


"Gentlemen", I said, "I've studied the maps"

by lagardère (laurore)



Series: another new world (an academia verse) [2]
Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Academia, Angst, Character Study, Edward Little-centric, Established Relationship, Long-Distance Relationship, M/M, Past Relationship(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-09
Updated: 2019-08-21
Packaged: 2020-08-14 00:10:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 16
Words: 23,679
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20183008
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laurore/pseuds/lagard%C3%A8re
Summary: Edward Little has a history of bad break-ups set against dramatic Arctic backdrops. The best way to avoid this happening with Jopson is, perhaps, to go to the Arctic without him - even if it means that he'll have to spend the next six months alone.





	1. the boathouse, 2005

**Author's Note:**

> RARE. PAIR. HELL. doubly so this time around.
> 
> As this is a companion piece and sequel to [For whoever can break through the ice](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19717885%22), which was told from Jopson's point of view, I would suggest reading that first.

“Don’t you think it’s strange, how what you study says so much about who you are?” Hickey said.

“That would make you a chameleon,” Sol pointed out. 

At that point in time, Hickey had already switched the subject of his studies several times, from psychology to neuroscience to anthropology by way of an unexplainable theology phase. The theology phase had lasted two months. Sol and Edward used to laugh about it - that was before Edward came to understand how dangerous it was to take Hickey lightly.

“Take Tom Hartnell,” Hickey said. “With his ice samples. The guy is simple - not stupid, mind you, but he has a clarity of focus. Transparent as ice. Never an errant thought. He believes in facts, in results…”

“So you’re saying a guy who studies science has a rational mind,” Sol said. “That’s groundbreaking, Cornelius.”

“I’ll raise you one,” Hickey said. “Take Little.”

“I can hear you, Hickey,” Edward called back, in the flat tone that he’d begun to use with Hickey, less out of wariness than because Hickey and his endless stream of persuasive nonsense had a tendency to drain him, like a prolonged exam or perhaps a sleepless night.

“I know you can hear me, Little.”

Irving and the others had already gone back inside - it was still early in the morning, at the start of winter, when the river wasn’t frozen but the air was cold enough that rowing through the mist felt like pushing through thin sheets of ice that rasped roughly against the boys’ cheeks and chins. Edward was putting away the last few oars from their boat. Hickey, as often, was discreetly standing by and watching as others did the work for him.

“We should head in,” Sol said. “It’s fucking freezing.”

Hickey only paid attention to his friends when it served his purpose.

“What does Edward work on, Solomon?” Hickey asked. It was a rhetorical question. “Edward is a Russian Arctic city.”

“Cornelius.”

“Edward is a brutalist building of grey concrete where the pipes burst and the flooding water’s turned to ice. Some people flee these cities, but Edward isn’t one of them - Edward is like those fourth-generation gulag descendents he told us about, the ones who don’t have the energy to leave. One day the ice will melt because of global warming and they’ll find his body like they find the bodies of dead climbers in the Himalayas. Frozen through, completely empty like the skin’s just become a porcelain shell…”

Edward had never before borne the brunt of one of Hickey’s attacks of bile - he’d only heard about them, how they washed over you so fierce and fast you were left with no room or strength to fight back. And besides, it had never been in his nature to fight back.

It was in Solomon Tozer’s, though - that time of all the times when Hickey had spoken out against someone - and Sol’s fist collided with Hickey’s nose and mouth, effectively shutting him up, diverting their attention to the spray of blood on Hickey’s shirt and to Hickey’s laboured breathing. 

Hickey did not seem in any way surprised, as if he’d always expected to be punched in the face, and maybe it had come later than he expected.

As he stumbled off towards the bathroom, clutching his nose, Edward shoved the last oar onto its rack, and he glanced back with some curiosity towards where Sol stood on the deck, flexing his fingers. Hickey had been wrong, in his theory and in its application. Edward didn’t identify with his studies. No one who knew him would have ever thought him empty or weak-willed or slowly withering, as dawn lit up braver and more promising men.

But there were few people who understood Edward then, less than could be counted on the fingers of one hand, and one was an alcoholic professor, and the other had the unexplainable flaw of being Hickey’s best friend.


	2. past the point where the signal breaks, 2019

The city Edward works on is waiting for the Arctic to melt. 

“You’d think it would be the big companies rejoicing about climate change,” Edward tells Jopson over the phone. “Gazprom, Nornickel... But it’s the little people…”

Jopson’s laugh reaches him in fragments across the distance, distorted by the erratic signal. 

“The _little people_?”

“I didn’t mean that in a condescending way,” Edward hastens to explain. “Regular people. People who actually have to make a living in these parts. They want the ice caps to melt too, so the Northeast Passage will open and bring trade to their doorsteps. They think climate change will lead to a boom for all these dying cities. You’d have to be Russian to think that - to view the goddamn Arctic as the future of your country, a place to find a better life.”

“And yet you’re in love with it.”

“With what?” 

Edward leans his forehead against the window and watches as a group of teenagers shamble along the roof of the building on the other side of the road. The building was abandoned a decade ago, and he doubts they’ll find much left in the deserted flats, but there’s a charm to the ruins as well, and maybe that’s what those Russian kids are after. That and a place that offers enough shelter from the wind to allow them to smoke and drink away from prying eyes, counting down the seconds until there’s a risk they’ll lose their fingers to frostbite, their hearts to hypothermia.

“With the goddamn Arctic,” Jopson tells him, his voice warm.

Edward clenches his jaw, knuckles rapping lightly against the window, one, two, three times, getting the wild upsurge of longing under control before he says something stupid.

Something like, _Get on a plane_ (two planes and a boat, to be accurate) - _Get on a plane as soon as you can and come and join me._

Such a request would not have occurred to him several weeks back. It had seemed wise, then, to put some distance between himself and Jopson, to take a step back and process this thing between them. Still, there had been a moment as Edward was about to board his train when he’d almost blurted it out. Jopson had just cycled across town from the library to see him off, with five days’ worth of dark stubble and his black hair sticking up where he’d run a hand through it and his clear eyes greener than blue in the fading light. Edward had fisted his hands in Jopson’s plaid shirt and pulled him forward so he could kiss him one last time, and Jopson had said something like, “I’m going to miss this,” hesitantly almost, as if he thought it might be badly received.

_Come with me._ But there would be no escaping each other in the close confines of an Arctic city. Edward has more than a passing idea of how things would turn out.

“We’re both in love with the Arctic, aren’t we?” he says. “The prof had a terrible influence on us. How is he doing? How’s this expedition of yours coming along?”

As Jopson begins to delve into a fairly entertaining rendition of the last meeting of his expedition committee, Edward closes his eyes and lets his thoughts quiet down, the craving receding to a dull ache. He’ll call Jopson again later, on his damn unreliable laptop, and he’ll somehow manage to get turned on by pixels and he’ll capture one breathless gasp by chance, even as every other word or sound on Jopson’s side is drowned in static or smothered into silence - and he thinks to himself, _I can do this, I can do this for another four months and not cave in._

But when they’ve hung up and it’s only him holding the disconnected phone to his ear, he can’t help but murmur, 

“I want you here. God, I want you here.”


	3. polar day, 2009

Edward’s first trip to the Arctic was a disaster in two parts.

First there was the official expedition, the sole focus of the second year of Edward’s PhD, when being Francis Crozier’s assistant became a succession of inventories and hotel and hut bookings and email writing in different languages, with carefully-crafted apologies to the various institutions that Crozier had managed to alienate with his lack of patience when it came to administrative hold-ups. Jopson would help Edward with most of the organising and they’d spend hours sitting on the carpet in Crozier’s office peering at the same spreadsheets, knees knocking together, eyes meeting for a second before they looked away, Edward wondering, “Is he…?” and then never getting a chance to find out, because the rest of the expedition voted to kick Jopson out a few days before they set out, and told Edward he could either stomach that decision or stay behind, "doodling penguins with his boyfriend".

Edward pleaded and protested, arguing that they should defer the expedition until Crozier returned from Canada, where he’d gone to confront Cornelius Hickey over a case of libel and plagiarism and academic fraud. His voice didn’t carry any weight - he lacked the authority, perhaps the gift of the gab. In the end, he went along with the expedition, and the expedition went wrong. He left Jopson behind, and they fell out for a full, drawn-out decade.

That was the first part.

Early on, Edward had made plans to leave the expedition a week before it officially ended and to spend the rest of the summer in Murmansk, to work on his PhD. Once the expedition fell apart, it seemed like a good idea to follow through with this plan.

He spent his first three days in Murmansk in a tiny hotel room, getting by on little food and no sleep, spending long swaths of time staring off into space and seeing the bright icy plain and Des Voeux holding a rifle and Collins falling through the ice - feeling in his bones the long cold drive with the unreliable car and his unreliable body at the wheel, Collins whimpering in the backseat, exhaustion turning to numbness and fear like another heartbeat, driving him half mad - Hartnell jolting from sleep to bark out “Edward, wake up!”

Edward’s hands would snap against an imaginary wheel as he brutally came to in the room with the black-out curtains. Then he’d roll over to check his watch on the bedside table - another fifteen minutes of sleep, not enough, not by a mile.

Then Sol called him from Vancouver. 

“Well,” Sol said, with his customary calm in the face of all Hickey-related dramas. “This Canada adventure didn’t pan out. I think Crozier is going to haul Cornelius home by the scruff of the neck, and it could be that it’s well-deserved.”

“Nunavut didn’t pan out either,” Edward said, just as quietly, though inwardly he felt like screaming, and laughing maybe, at the both of them, at their ridiculousness, this British capacity for understatement that wasn’t so much a way of keeping face as of never fully facing things.

“Where are you?” Sol asked.

“Murmansk. I’m supposed to stay for a full month.”

There was a prolonged silence during which Edward could hear the parking lot where Sol was, car doors slamming shut and voices echoing in the still air.

“I could come and join you,” Sol said.

“Not without a visa, you couldn’t,” Edward pointed out, in his most reasonable voice.

“Yeah, but I can apply for that once I get back, can’t I? And then if it drags on or it doesn’t work, well, you won’t see me. How does that sound?”

“The not-seeing you?”

Outside, a car alarm started blaring. A muted thud against the wall indicated that the couple next door was either fighting or making up again, for the third time that night.

“Bloody awful,” Edward said, eyes shut against the implications of that confession and the absurdity of Sol’s offer, when they had hardly been in touch for the past two years, when the flight would cost Sol an arm and a leg and if things didn’t work out between them, there would hardly be anywhere to run.

Edward’s first trip to the Arctic was a disaster in two parts. This was the beginning of the second part.


	4. the research station, 2019 / not quite eton, 2003

The research station used to employ ten people. Now it’s mostly Natalia, a woman with short, charcoal-grey hair and a face like a carved block of weathered wood. She was born in another dying city from a Ukrainian woman sentenced to ten years’ hard labour. Natalia has worked at the station for the past thirty years, studying weather variations. In recent months, she has been joined by an incongruous British trio, as a result of a convention between Oxford and Cambridge and Moscow State University. 

George is a climatologist whose belief in science verges on the spiritual. His French is far better than his Russian, as was already the case when Edward first met him - at school, some twenty years ago. At the time, George went by his last name, Hodgson, and his pale features and his foppish blond hair made him look like the heir to a Victorian fortune in a gothic novel, chronically ill and somewhat spoiled. 

The last two decades haven’t really changed him, aside from turning his soft, dreamy-eyed looks into a frustrating sort of apathy.

Then there is Dr Cracroft, whose calm demeanour hides a will of untempered steel. She has come to study the southwards migrations of polar bears. Edward has the distinct impression that everything he says gets on her nerves. Dr Cracroft he knows from Cambridge, as a longtime friend of his mentor, Francis Crozier. She speaks fluent Russian and seems to be sad even when she is pleased.

Edward joined them seven weeks ago, and is slated to stay for another four months. The four of them interact out of necessity, rather than by affinity. George sometimes dogs Edward’s step like a tired ghost, producing tea bags out of thin air to try and prolong their rare conversations.

Edward has not yet found a way to communicate to George that he would rather not talk about the large pond behind their old school, or the double sculls that the older students were expected to row down the canal, or the houses named after famous Brisith authors and the portraits of two centuries’ worth of headmasters in the dining hall, and how George remembers Edward climbing up on Irving’s shoulders on the final night before they were to leave school, so that he could carefully lift the current headmaster’s portrait off its hook.

“I kept watch for you boys, but I think I went back to bed afterwards, and I never did find out what you’d done with the painting,” George muses, as he bites off a corner of his digestive (he seems to have a limitless supply of these, for he brings a pack out whenever they’re having tea, and Edward has seen him nibbling on them at his workstation). “And the next day Freddie Lyme-Barber got a goat up the clock tower and everyone was talking about that instead... I thought your prank was a good one, though. Stealing the painting. Nobody liked Headmaster Conway, anyways.”

The sharp hiss of the cane echoes in Edward’s ears, the headmaster’s severe tone as he told him to straighten his uniform and, as Edward silently rose from his slump across the desk, trying not to wince in pain, _A little humiliation in life can do wonders to remind a boy of what it means to be a man. Let us not catch you engaging in inappropriate behaviour again, Mr Little. Be it in the boathouse or anywhere else. I would not be so lenient, then._

“So what did you do with it?”

“What?” Edward asks, startled, raising his eyes from the black smear of leaves at the bottom of his mug.

“The painting,” George repeats. Under the neon lights, his pale skin has a greyish-blue tinge. His hair is almost green. But then again, George has never looked particularly healthy. At school, he’d been exempted from most physical activities. Edward can’t remember where the Hodgsons’ money came from, but it must have gone back a few centuries; treasures buried in a number of countryside manors. No one at school had ever dared discipline George.

_You do know corporeal punishment was outlawed ten years ago_, Irving had said, when he’d seen Edward limber towards the half-sunken deck where they perched to take their meals in the spring and late summer, legs dangling among the reeds, polished shoes disturbing the green muck at the surface of the pond. _If you speak up, you could actually get Conway in trouble._

_Not enough trouble for it to be worth it, and we’re leaving anyways,_ Edward had said, lowering himself down upon the planks, face briefly contorted in pain. He’d let his body lean sideways against Irving’s and Irving had let him - as if there had ever been any physical proximity between them, rather than Irving’s naive and hurtful fear that Edward might somehow contaminate him. Irving’s beliefs regarding homosexuality were about as dated as the school’s old stones.

And yet Irving had been the one to say, _If we can’t get him, we should go after that stupid painting._ Irving who was as straight as they came, in his appearance and his grades and his inability to ever miss an office at the small school chapel.

They rowed the painting out to the middle of the pond at two in the morning, and Edward lowered the headmaster into the sweet-smelling water as insects buzzed about and in this moment he felt happier than in a full ten years at the school, and he’d looked into the headmaster’s painted green-brown eyes as they disappeared under water, the painting sucked in slowly rather than sinking straight to the bottom, and Irving had laughed about it all the way back to their dorm. It gave his handsome features a roguish air that suited him far better than his usual grave composure.

“I don’t remember what we did with it,” Edward tells George, somewhat dismissively. “We must have put it back, I guess. I don’t know.”

He doesn’t think Irving ever told anyone. Even now, it fills him with a quiet warmth that he supposes isn’t unlike the comradeship of soldiers who have served in the same war. 

“Best days of my life,” George says, blissfully unaware of the way Edward’s jaw tenses, brown eyes going flat and dull, mouth twisting into a grimace of condescension.

George doesn’t see it but Natalia does, and meeting her eyes Edward remembers where he is, the dying city and the melting landscape, the cemetery where Natalia’s mother was buried at forty-eight years old. Natalia had remarked that it hadn’t changed much, even with the collapse of the USSR, life expectancy is still drastically shorter up here than down in the south, the main difference being that they make money now, so they die with more things strewn about their Soviet-era flats, but they die all the same.

_Maybe that’s why I keep coming north,_ Edward thinks, as he returns Natalia’s wry smile. _A much needed sense of perspective._

Gathering their empty mugs, he goes to rinse them in the sink, leaving George to his nostalgia.


	5. the concrete tenement, 2019

“I can’t see you.”

“I didn’t want to turn the light back on... Does it bother you? That I can see you and you can’t see me?”

“No,” Jopson smiles. “I have to finish an email though, can I take a few minutes to do that?”

“Knock yourself out.”

Jopson is sitting cross-legged on the carpet in Crozier’s office, with his back to the mustard-coloured couch. It was already his favourite spot ten years ago. Edward had sat and worked and slept on this couch more times than he could say, back in the day.

He’d also found Crozier sleeping in it once or twice after a hard binge, in a worrisome still-life of dark yellow fabric and flushed skin and blond hair damp over a creased brow.

_What should I do?_ he’d asked Professor Franklin and James Fitzjames the first time this had happened - as they arrived for their appointed meeting and found him staring down at Crozier. Edward had only had enough presence of mind to gently kick the empty bottle under the couch.

_A good night’s rest and you won’t be able to tell he was ever unwell!_ Franklin had said, with his customary good cheer.

James’ already long face had somehow lengthened. He’d sneered and stormed out - this was long before Francis decided to quit drinking, long before him and James set aside their differences and became friends. 

“Francis is meeting James at St John’s for dinner, so I don’t think he’ll be back anytime soon,” Jopson says as he types.

_I could fall asleep to this._ Edward’s thoughts are sluggish, the anxiety receding to the back of his mind. Back in Cambridge, in the months before he left, it was usually the other way round - Jopson falling asleep in the middle of the afternoon, with his cheek smashed against Edward’s leg, or sliding into bed early in the morning, having just arrived from the train station, and drifting off as Edward woke up from a half-sleep, with Jopson’s cold feet tucked against his calves - or, a dear memory, Jopson nodding off on Edward’s shoulder as they stood at the back of a pub, Edward gently confiscating his pint and setting it down before it fell.

“Edward?” 

“I’m still awake,” he murmurs, eyes drifting shut.

Perhaps he dreams the creak of the door, Jopson looking over his shoulder and Francis Crozier’s unmistakable voice, the perennial greeting: “Ah, Jopson.”

For a second before he falls asleep, he couldn’t say where he is, or how old. The past ten years might as well have been a troubling dream. 

It is a feeling far too pleasant to be trusted.


	6. towards the river, 2006

Edward does not have a specific memory of his first meeting with Jopson, though he knows how it must have gone - Francis introducing them to each other, _Edward Little, my assistant, Edward, meet Thomas Jopson, a first year student with an interest in Inuit culture._ At the time, Jopson had known nothing about Inuits - it’s how Jopson himself had put it when he’d reminisced about those days with Edward, _I knew nothing about Inuits and barely anything about the north. Francis taught me everything._

_You repaid him tenfold_, Edward had answered, thinking of the day Crozier had announced to them that he’d decided to quit drinking, and of the months that followed, of how Edward and Crozier’s friends kept his career afloat while Jopson looked after Crozier himself, putting up a front of relentless good cheer and patience and enthusiasm. It had occurred to Edward then that while he would willingly die for Crozier out of a (perhaps misplaced) sense of duty, Jopson would readily do it out of love.

Edward might not remember the first time they met, but he does remember the first time he saw Jopson - properly saw him, rather than dismissing him as one of Crozier’s hangers-on.

It must have been five or six in the morning and Edward was cycling towards the river, wearing his rowing gear and a college hoodie and nothing else despite the wintry weather. He’d been out at a social until three and he’d missed Irving and Gore’s departure for the boathouse. Once he did come down from his room, he lost a couple more minutes lagging in the lodge in order to avoid Hickey, who had also been at the mixer and whom Irving swore he’d seen snogging that guy Gibson from Trinity.

Edward had waited until Hickey’s bike had disappeared around the corner. By the time he finally hurtled down the road and a nail punctured his tire, he was already well on his way to being late, which meant seven rowers and Hickey and the coach would be waiting for him in the cold, which meant trouble.

He threw his lock around a fence and left the bike behind as he jogged gently downhill, trying to ignore how his entire body seemed to protest the motions, the aches of a night’s worth of drinking and graceless dancing and Sol telling him, the smell of beer strong on his breath, _You tossers calling each other by your last names all the time, you should go by Edward, suits you better_, palm flat on Edward’s crotch, and his mouth tasted of beer too, as Edward’s fingers gripped his hair, trying to find an angle at which things wouldn’t be so blurry, Sol’s face, the people dancing, the blinking lights. Edward had stepped sideways, tripping over his own feet, and blustered, “I need a cigarette,” although he’d never smoked in his life.

This early in the morning the streets were empty, the revellers gone home and the workers not yet come out of their houses, and it wasn’t until Edward reached Chesterton Road that he saw someone cycling fast the other way. To his surprise the cyclist hit the brakes and stopped beside him. It was only then that he recognised Jopson.

“Little, hi,” Jopson smiled, and taking a look at Edward’s get-up he added, “you should be wearing more layers, it’s freezing.”

“I was in a hurry,” Edward said, leaving out the party and the fact that his head weighed a ton, which the sharp aftertaste of the cigarettes didn’t help, lingering even after he’d washed his teeth, making him feel queasy and young and thoroughly stupid. “And my bike broke down,” he added, “flat tire, I’m going to be horrifyingly late, I need to go, I’m sorry.”

“Late to what?” Jopson blinked.

“Rowing. We meet up at 6 and they’re all waiting and I forgot my phone...”

“Do you want to borrow mine?”

“I don’t know their numbers.”

“Here,” Jopson said - this Edward remembers well, how seamless the move was, as if Jopson hadn’t even had to think about it, letting the idea evolve into action. “Take my bike.” When Edward put up a token protest, Jopson turned the bike around and placed it in front of him, ready to serve. “You can bring it back to me this afternoon, I’ll be in Professor Crozier’s office.”

Since Edward didn’t have time to debate the offer any further, he decided to jump on.

“Thanks, Jopson. You’re a life saviour.” As he was about to push off, he remembered to ask, “you’ll be alright walking home, won’t you? What were you even doing out?”

“I finished a good book, I couldn’t sleep.” Jopson smiled, dimples showing. “It’s fine, I’ll walk it off.”

“I owe you, mate. I really do.”

Edward pedalled as if his life depended on it, though when he arrived, it turned out that Des Voeux wasn’t there. They had to wait another fifteen minutes while someone called in Sol and he dragged himself out of bed and to the boathouse to replace Des Voeux, whom Edward had clearly seen knocking back tequila shots at the mixer.

Edward spent those fifteen minutes nursing a mug of coffee in the relative warmth of the boathouse, thinking of Jopson’s strange demeanour, that blend of good graces and gentle determination, of Jopson pushing the bike against his side and calling him “Little” as if that was something he usually did, rather than a cue he’d chosen to follow.

Edward had tried, desperately, to grasp for his first name. It wasn’t until Sol appeared on the bridge that it came back to him.

_Thomas._

Like one unfolds a note and reads it and folds it back carefully to tuck it somewhere safe, where no one else will see it.

And in these first three years of coming to know Thomas Jopson, as curiosity turned to respect and affection, turned to desire and regret, Edward would never once utter his first name out loud.


	7. the bin storage area outside the research station, 2019

In spring, when the sun comes out in this small Arctic town, the outdoors becomes surprisingly bearable. Edward emerges from the building at around 2 for a cigarette and is surprised when Dr Cracroft joins him, a black beanie pulled low over her brow, her long hair tucked beneath it.

“Can I have one?”

Edward wordlessly makes her a cigarette and lights it for her. 

“How’s the bears?” he asks.

“I got a call from Anton this morning. We went up to the military base - three bears had broken through a fence and they were holding up in an old ammunition depot. You can imagine the panic, or lack thereof… “Tension” would be more appropriate. These men don’t panic.”

“What happened to the bears?”

“Nothing, so far.” She rubs her eyes with a tired hand. “Polar bears are still a protected species around here. Anton made a point of reminding them - they wouldn’t listen to me, for some unfathomable reason… Even then I’m surprised nothing blew up. Some of the explosives in there are positively stalinian. I called Harry and Silna in Canada. Silna seemed to find the situation rather funny.”

“And Goodsir was appalled,” Edward guesses.

“Gently reproving,” she corrects him. “As if the whole thing could have been avoided somehow. Maybe if we’d politely asked the bears to leave? As it was, we were relieved to have been able to lead them away. We’ll try to keep monitoring them - Kolya named them after the brothers Karamazov.” She puts out her cigarette on the window sill and burrows her hands in her pockets. “It doesn’t solve anything in the long run. We still have bears moving south, coming far too close to human dwellings.”

“We all wanted to work on different subjects and in the end, we’re all working on climate change, aren’t we?” Edward says, one of these jokes that comes out sounding far too much like a statement.

It is an unspoken contract between them that their conversations do not exceed the boundaries of their respective fields of study, though Edward would be hard-pressed to say why either of them abides by it. He has known Sophia Cracroft for over a decade: to know Crozier is to know her, with her analytical mind and her quiet composure and the ashen blond hair that Crozier had once written a poem about, which Edward found inside an old treatise of navigation, and which he’d wisely refrained from ever bringing up. Yet they have never had a conversation that was not purely pragmatic, which has led Edward to suspect that, perhaps, she might not like him very much.

“How is your work going?” she asks.

“I’ve received records from Moscow,” he says. “Birth and death rates. Even after the collapse of the USSR the numbers don’t quite add up. Migratory flows I can reasonably follow: people come here, they leave. I’m having a harder time defining what permanence might look like in these parts. Maybe there isn’t any. Life expectancy is so much shorter here, even those who stay don’t stay long.”

“Do you ever feel... Empty-handed?”

“Empty-handed?” he frowns.

“What we’re doing here… Watching species die out, and glaciers melt, and coming out to smoke cigarettes as if we don’t care about the pollution in the air and we really want to finish off our lungs. We chose to come here, alone. Do you ever feel... empty-handed?”

Edward considers the question, thinking of how things have always felt like they were slipping away from him - family ties, people and places, the rowing as part of a crew of eight replaced by early morning jogs, the smoking filling some other void, the fear that if he doesn’t write first, Irving will forget about him, that it’s only a question of time before he disappoints Francis again, that if he grips Jopson too hard, Jopson will have to wrench free and leave. That he’ll end up as alone as he is now, when he tries to pretend that he can cope with this, as if he’d been meant to live a life of melting ice and of lying awake in the dark - as if he might as well get used to it.

_Do you ever feel like your hands ache from not being held?_, he wants to ask her.

“There’s nothing empty about this place,” he says instead. It’s also a truth, though perhaps a more encouraging one. “It takes some wrestling to catch anything, I’ll give you that… Sometimes it feels like I’m trying to catch fish bare-handed. Fighting back against figures that make no sense, trying to get the truth out of people who have forgotten what the truth was. But so many here are attached to this strange life. They take pride in it. There’s something about the long darkness, the harshness of daylight for months on end, that breeds love and good cheer in these people. Russia sent them to Hell and they colonised Hell. I’ll never cease to be amazed by it. The improbability of life in these parts, the sheer madness of it… I think… We’re explorers, aren’t we? At the edges of the earth, or at the ends of the world. This being said… you’re right. When the work stops, and when exhaustion catches up with me… I suppose I feel empty-handed, then.” 

He hesitates, but she gives him an expectant look, a small jerk of the chin inviting him to continue. 

“When I first came here,” he says, “I tried to bring the rest of my life with me. It didn’t work out.”

“It didn’t work out for me either.” She leans back against the wall, hands in the pockets of her raincoat. “I think we miss the same things. A safety net… A comfort zone. I used to think it was a good thing to break free. Now I’m not so sure.”

There were rumours, over the years, about Sophia Cracroft and Francis Crozier. People said that he had asked her out, and that she’d turned him down - or that she had gone out with him, but that she had refused to marry him. They made an odd pair, the two of them, the anthropologist and the biologist, Crozier some twenty years her senior, a sarcastic, drunk Irishman, irascible at times though he was surprisingly at ease and careful with her. In her presence his broad, homely features took on an almost distinguished air. Edward has seen Crozier be kind and caring, with Jopson, with a number of his friends - less so with Edward himself, with whom he maintains a mostly professional, rather than paternal, relationship, a dynamic that had probably been greatly influenced by Edward himself. After all, he’s rarely ever had anything but professional relationships with the authority figures in his life, including both his parents. 

When it came to Sophia Cracroft however, Edward had glimpsed another side of Crozier, in subtle touches and the swift exchange of glances, a courtship all the more surprising for how naturally it seemed to come to the often introverted Crozier, and for how warmly it had once been received - Sophia Cracroft sitting on Crozier’s old couch, his hand folding over hers as they listened to some old record that could have been Haendel or whale songs, the both of them jumping apart when Edward made his presence known, as if there had been something indecent about their quiet hand-holding.

At heart, Edward knows them to be like-minded people, opiniated and devoted to their work, but it’s the rest that he doesn’t know - the covered part of the iceberg, that myriad personal happenings that slowly eat up a relationship until even the most casual interaction is loaded with unspoken and painful meaning.

“It was nice talking to you,” she says. “You never talk much, so it’s easy to assume that you dislike people.”

“I don’t dislike you,” Edward says, his surprise catching him off-guard so that his protest comes out rushed and embarrassed.

“That’s good to know,” she smiles. As always, it’s a sad smile, but Edward is hardly in a position to criticise anyone for failing to be cheerful. It occurs to him that they might be more similar than he’d realised. “Maybe I was wrong,” she goes on. “To think that we can’t dedicate ourselves to our work and still have a life on the side. What do you think: should I say yes to Anton, go out to dinner with him?”

Edward thinks of the three restaurants in town, all of them an acquired taste, and of Sophia’s blundering Russian colleague, a gentle giant of a man with cold blue eyes and a bushy brown beard.

“Go for it, mate,” he says, inadvertently finding the careless tone he uses with his close friends.

“I shall keep you updated.”

“Please do.”

She looks up at the pale blue sky, hands balled deep in the pockets of her raincoat.

“I should go back. Dr Little…”

“Dr Cracroft.”

“Until the next cigarette,” she says.


	8. rumpled bed sheets in Cambridge, 2019 / a homecoming, 2009

“Should we tell the professor?” Jopson asked.

Edward knew for a fact that Francis had told Jopson to call him by his first name rather than “professor” or “sir”. This being said, Jopson had also told Edward to call him Thomas, and as Edward couldn’t seem to do so, it was hardly his place to pass judgement.

“Tell him what?”

The question was a way of buying himself time - Edward knew straightaway what Jopson meant. There weren’t many things he could have been talking about, lying naked in bed with his black hair rucked up and the imprint of Edward’s fingers a vivid red on his shoulder.

“About this,” Jopson said.

It was ten days after they’d met again. Nine days and a few hours since they’d fallen into bed together. Six days since Jopson had decided he was accepting Crozier’s job offer and moving to Cambridge.

Two hours since Edward had confessed about his upcoming, six month research trip to northern Siberia; one hour and a half since they’d decided fucking would do them better than arguing, and what was there to argue about, anyways, as Jopson had pointed out while he pulled down Edward’s jeans, pausing long enough to remove Edward’s shoes. “You’re going north! And so soon. It’s wonderful news.”

“You’ll be going with Francis,” Edward reminded him. He let himself be kissed, went on, “it’s only in seven months, you’ll be there before you know it.”

It was only later, lying spent across the bed, breathing still a tad rushed, that Jopson admitted, “I didn’t want to ask anyone if you’d be a part of Crozier’s expedition. I didn’t want to hear that you wouldn’t be.”

“I applied to this program almost a year ago,” Edward said. “I didn’t know we’d meet again, and even if I had…”

“No, no, of course,” Jopson hurried to say.

Edward half-rose so he could meet his eyes.

“Six months is nothing,” he said. “It took us two hours to get over the estrangement of ten years. I’d say the odds are in our favour.”

Jopson smiled, a quiet, fleeting hint at something that Edward couldn’t quite grasp. It looked like relief, maybe like hope. 

“Should we tell the professor?” he asked.

Edward didn’t want to be the one to point out the obvious - that should their new relationship flounder, they would have to deal with Crozier knowing why, even as they both continued to work with him, unless - and the thought was painful to consider, but somewhat inevitable - Edward gave up on both Crozier and Jopson in order to let Jopson have the life he’d once lost, in part by Edward’s fault.

“Not yet,” he said. “I don’t know how to… Let’s wait, before we tell him. He doesn’t… he doesn’t know that I’m…”

This last admission was harder maybe than the rest.

“It’s alright,” Jopson said, turning onto his side, “we don’t have to say a thing,” and his hands and mouth soon provided a welcome distraction from the awkward conversation.

The fact is that Edward has hardly ever told anyone. It’s not a secret. He’d thought it was, at first, until Hickey made a comment once on the river and he understood by the quick, snappish callbacks of his crewmates that everyone knew. But it’s different to admit to it, out loud. 

His parents had heard it from the school, which had led to an uncomfortable talk about “phases” and how “growing up means giving up on one’s childhood fancies”.

As far back as Edward can remember, he has only ever come out to one person.

When he returned from Murmansk, he’d tried to come back to his old room in Cambridge, only to find out that he’d forgotten to reapply for it. He’d only just got off the train after a fifteen hour journey, he hadn’t showered or slept in two days, and the showdown with Sol in the sad little flat in Murmansk was still fresh in his memory. Once he’d found out his room was occupied, he’d made his way to Crozier’s office, like a wayward dog walking back to the only home and master he knew. 

Crozier wasn’t there. Edward learned from Professor Stanley - having steeled himself to go knock on the old fob’s door, and having endured his icy disapproval, no doubt related to the expedition since the entire university must have got word of the debacle by then - that Crozier had been invited by the Franklins to spend the remainder of the summer holidays with them and their niece, Sophia Cracroft.

In the end, Edward had dragged himself to the hall with half a thought to get something to eat that wasn’t airplane food, and it was there, among fresh-faced undergrads and returning veterans sporting impressive sunburns, that he’d run into James Fitzjames, who had a canvas bag in one hand and was entertaining the fellows at the high table with an account of his latest travels.

“Little,” Fitzjames said, making his way towards Edward with an unexpected smile. “Does Francis know you’re back? He’ll be glad.”

At which point the past three months finally caught up with Edward - Crozier having to abandon the expedition, the committee deciding to leave Jopson behind, the nightmare of the expedition itself, the estrangement of Murmansk, of the library and the flat, the two-timed punch of Sol’s arrival and departure, the long journey home with the taste of failure rising at the back of his throat like bile - and he’d felt his bag slide from his shoulder as his hands began to shake, and some of it must have shown on his face because Fitzjames had frowned.

“Are you alright, Edward?”

Which must have been the death knell, Francis’ friend using his name as Francis would have, as if he knew Edward, as if Edward was someone worth being known and even trusted.

“The expedition was a fiasco, my research is going nowhere and my boyfriend broke up with me in an airport terminal,” he said. “Additionally, I no longer have a room.”

James Fitzjames, whom Crozier had once memorably described as “a pretentious prick whose only redeeming feature is that mop of shiny hair”, laid a hand on Edward’s shoulder and grasped it firmly.

“Give me your bag,” he said. “You must be tired. I can take on the load.”

Four months later, Crozier and Fitzjames knocked on Edward’s door and asked if he’d come spend the Christmas holiday at Fitzjames’ house again, with Crozier in full attendance this time, due to a fallout with the Franklins.

And the year that followed, Edward packed his jumpers and thick winter socks a few days ahead of Fitzjames’ invitation, and for the first time since he’d left school, he didn’t notice his parents’ silence over Christmas Eve, being far too involved in the verbal sparring that had overtaken the Fitzjames household, in the shape of Crozier’s friend Blanky, a Jewish glaciologist who had more than one enlightened opinion as to the contrived nature of Christian holidays.


	9. the nightclub, 2019 / cambridge nightlife, 2003-2008

The town boasts two bars and a monthly nightclub. The nightclub is “monthly” in that it really does open once a month. 

Edward used to go clubbing, back when he was in his late teens and early twenties and still willing to engage with the undergraduate side of university life. His memories of such outings are a blur of stroboscopic lights and sweet, fluorescent drinks, of blind groping and drunk thrusting that everyone would pretend, the following day, had never happened, a fact Edward had learned to accept early on, tirades like, _You have me mistaken with somebody else, the bar was dark, half of the guys there were dark-haired and reasonably tall, and with a packed dance floor it’s easy to assume that someone is grinding against you_ \- although come to think of it, Irving hadn’t said “grinding”, Edward is fairly sure he’d said “gyrating”, right before he doubled over in the bathroom of the boathouse and started puking his guts anew. It was the one and only time he went out with the rest of them, well-to-do Irving whose kindness sometimes broke through the shell of his education, whose old-fashioned morals had once led to a surreal conversation in the boat, where sitting in front, Irving had to face Hickey on a daily basis. 

_Self control, Hickey_, Irving had said, as Hickey raised his eyebrows at Edward who sat right behind Irving and who made a point never to let himself be distracted by Hickey’s grimaces. _You could easily be more focused if you diverted your energies towards any other outlet than… same-sex intercourse. Have you tried art? Pottery maybe. Or climbing, maybe jogging?_

_Climbing?_ Hickey repeated, his face deceptively blank. _Climbing, Irving, really?_

And there had been the time when they’d seen Jopson at the club, drinking something that looked suspiciously like a Coke. It had made the others laugh but not Edward, who’d spent enough evenings prying empty whiskey tumblers from Crozier’s surprisingly strong grip and making midnight runs to the 24/7 store around the corner to replenish the professor’s bar as Jopson watched on that if he’d seen Jopson drinking, he might have walked up to the bar and knocked the glass out of his hand.

_What’s your read on the guy? Gay or decidedly not straight? Eunuch or party whore?_

Edward remembers that spiel in Des Voeux’s slightly nasal voice, though his recollection might be altered by the antipathy he’d developed towards Des Voeux during their joint Arctic expedition. Some of Edward’s friends had bet on Jopson’s sexual proclivities that night, and he’d endured their pushing and prodding, _What will it be, Little? You’ve spent enough time with the guy, all these hours locked together in crazy Crozier’s office, did he ever make a move on you?_

_Don’t be stupid,_ he’d said, knocking aside an elbow, ignoring a suggestive smile, vodka or whatever else sloshing over the rim of his glass as he quickly retreated towards the bathroom. He’d been a drink away from confessing that although Jopson had never made any sort of overture, Edward really, really wished that he would. Aside from his boyish good looks, with the black hair and stunning blue eyes, Jopson was so relentlessly good that it made him seem like an oasis in the middle of the Cambridgean desert of perverted tussles and academic feuds.

In time, Edward gave up on the all-night clubbing. When he does go out, he tends to favour pubs over clubs. As far as he knows, Sophia isn’t really the partying type either, and Natalia prefers to have her evening drink at the station, staring hard at the fading light outside. 

George, meanwhile, is used to a particular kind of venue. Once, when Edward was maybe sixteen years old, George’s father had taken them to his club, where Edward had crouched behind the bar with the miscreant son of a French diplomat, sipping berry-flavoured vodka straight from the bottle, while Irving impressed a few MPs with his athletic skills on the tennis court outside.

This can be said of George Hodgson, however, that he can be talked into pretty much anything.

It was Anton’s idea that they should all head out, or rather, he had invited Sophia, who had invited Edward within earshot of Natalia, and Edward eventually told George because it seemed like the right thing to do.

The nightclub doesn’t look so much like a club and more like a shabby sort of bar. When they regroup there after dinner and drinks at one of the restaurants in town, the place is already packed but there’s hardly anyone dancing, the party-goers choosing instead to drink at the bar or sit around the low square tables. An old man wearing a faded cap that has seen a war or two is manning the DJ station with a frantic efficiency that makes up for his seeming lack of enthusiasm.

“No dancing?” George asks (screams at) Natalia.

She gestures at her watch. Too early. Edward orders a drink and takes a seat at the table Anton has managed to hog for them. The club is underground and consequently void of any signal, and with every new sip of a glass that seems to contain ¾ of vodka to a dash of beer, Edward has to refrain from jogging upstairs and drunkenly calling Jopson from the cold alleyway outside the club.

“Are you having fun?” Anton asks (screams at) Sophia, the Russian and the alcohol and the noise making it hard to make out his words, though Sophia answers with a nod and a smile. Edward doubts that Anton is perceptive enough at this point - that he knows Sophia enough - to be able to sense her coolness towards him.

There has been a number of shared cigarettes since that first break on the day the bears infiltrated the military compound. Edward has had a first row seat to Anton and Sophia’s short-lived romance, from the awkward and endearing courtship to Sophia deciding, inevitably perhaps, that a workplace relationship would only get in the way of her research.

He isn’t certain, however, that Sophia has told Anton as much. Lately, Edward has noticed that Sophia is spending far more time at the research station, rather than at the lab on the other side of town, where Anton is based.

“The last time I was here, there was a band!” George shouts enthusiastically at Edward.

“You were here before?” Edward shouts back.

George answers something that sounds like “With Anna!”, but not knowing any Annas in relation to George, Edward assumes he must have misheard.

Anton orders another round. Edward’s drink is clearer than the last, perhaps a ⅘ proportion of vodka to ⅕ of beer. The music has grown more aggressive, even though the dance floor remains empty. Natalia asks them how they’re settling in, to which George attempts an answer in Russian that has everyone staring at him for several long seconds until Anton decides to pat him on the back. The low lighting in the club gives George the appearance of a drowned man.

Edward downs his drink and picks up his parka and his cigarettes, glancing in Sophia’s direction. “Later,” she says, loud enough that it’ll carry across the table. 

“You’ll miss the night,” he warns her, though he might be wrong. He doesn’t quite know what time it is.

On his way up, he has to force a path through the growing crowd. The cold air is refreshing for perhaps twenty seconds before his body catches on that it’s minus 6 degrees, and he hastily stuffs his arms through the sleeves of his parka and puts on his hat and scarf, sparing enough time to light his cigarette before he pulls on his gloves.

Edward has lived in a number of northern cities in the past ten years, since that first expedition to Nunavut. The longest was the two years he spent in Anchorage, but there were also the trips to Norilsk and Murmansk and Vorkuta and Tiksi, the latter at the end of a two-week journey on an icebreaker - and two years ago he’d spent a memorable winter in Tromsø, travelling to Svalbard for the new year with Blanky and Hartnell, the both of whom were there to survey the ice. Seven years after his flight from Nunavut, he’d returned to Canada with Crozier for four months in Iqaluit, and with Harry Goodsir he’s been to Groenland, though that was in the midst of writing his PhD, so that most of his memories of Nuuk are of the cafe where he’d hunker down and type page after page as the sun outside forgot to set.

The sun is the hardest part about living in the Arctic, in Edward’s enlightened opinion. The polar night is kinder to insomniacs than this endless display of piercing light. It was what had briefly made him hesitate when he’d been offered the grant - the knowledge that he would have to come here in the spring and early summer, and endure the polar day from beginning to end.

His phone indicates 11:25pm. Another half hour and the sun will set - for a single hour. Edward stares drunkenly at his messages without quite taking them in. Work and more work, Crozier sending him a 40-page article to proofread “in the next two days, thank you”, Irving asking for news from London where he recently inherited a flat from a deceased uncle and where he’s moved in with his wife, a carefree playwright with a wicked serve, whose bouquet had hit Edward full in the face on their wedding day.

He has received texts from Jopson, too, about the cat on the _Terra Nova_ expedition and the disgusting bread and butter pudding that the college served at dinner the day before, and about the Masters student at the University Library who always sits in the same section as him and whom he’s seen eating cereal bars and dried fruit and, this very morning, a ripe tomato, secure in the knowledge that there is no surveillance whatsoever in this section, and that Jopson is far too kind to tattle on her.

“What are you doing, working at the UL?” Edward asks when Jopson picks up. “It’s the most depressing library in town.”

“Maybe it suited my mood,” Jopson says, his tone nothing but playful, but it twists at something inside Edward all the same.

He couldn’t say if it’s this or the alcohol that has him bluster, “Come join me.”

“What?” Jopson repeats, the amusement still here, tinged with hesitation maybe.

“Come and join me,” Edward repeats, breath rising white in the clear night air. “You’d see the north. I’d see you. I used to think that… I used to be able to go for months without sex, but at this point I think I’ll go mad if I have to spend another night wanking off in front of my laptop without being able to touch you.” It’s easy, somehow, to pretend that what he misses most is the sex - it seems impossible to admit that what he craves is at once less and more than that. It’s the casual intimacy of a hand briefly stroking the back of his neck or lightly tapping his thigh, the now familiar weight and warmth of Jopson’s body at his back when he’s trying to sleep - the pleasurable thought that Jopson will still be here, along with the rest of the world, if he does fall asleep and when he eventually wakes up.

“Touch me how?” Jopson asks.

Edward shuts his eyes, gloved fingers tensing around the cigarette. 

“Everyone knows you can hook up in the UL,” he says. “It’s almost a rite of passage. We’d just have to move a few aisles down from your friend with the snacks, not that she’d be in much of a position to rat you out.”

“It’s a date. When you get back.”

Edward knows it won’t happen, and that Jopson knows it too, rule-abiding as they are. It makes it easier to play along, to say, “I’ll go down on you if you keep watch, and if anyone shows up, we were just looking for… I don’t know. What are you working on? Is it still petrels?”

Jopson’s voice is strained, and if Edward had any faith in their broken connexion he’d say that he’s breathing harder than he was a minute ago.

“Is that a new euphemism? Looking for petrels?”

Edward takes another drag of the cigarette, trying to banish the image he foolishly conjured up, trying to remind himself that he is hardly the kind of person who’d get turned on by the prospect of sex in public places. The one semi-authenticated story he’s heard was from Irving walking into the French literature section and having to dance aside to let William Gibson rush by in the act of zipping up his trousers - after which he’d looked around the shelf and found Hickey innocently flipping through _Les Misérables_. 

But the issue with Hickey is that even while it is easy to cast him in the role of nefarious manipulator and liar and plagiarist and all-around irredeemable arsehole, he also has a preternatural ability to make the most out of life while everyone else fumbles on.

“Come north,” Edward finds himself saying again. “I’ve got another four months, you’re not leaving for Iqaluit until August…”

“How drunk are you?” Jopson asks, with that same tone he’d used earlier in their conversation, amusement mingled with worry.

Edward winces.

“God, am I slurring?”

“No, but you’re saying what you want. I’m not used to that,” Jopson says. “You rarely say what’s on your mind.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. I wasn’t… In spite of the calls, I wasn’t sure where we stood. It’s not as if we told anyone about this, and since you didn’t want to tell the professor…”

“I’d bet an arm that Crozier already knows,” Edward says. “But you have my blessing if what you need to make this official is a formal announcement.”

The following silence might be Jopson floundering at the thought that Crozier is aware of his love life.

“That wasn’t… It can be hard to know what you think at times. And if this isn’t just you saying you want me here because you’re drunk…”

“It isn’t.”

“Then I’m glad you said it. And if it was in any way possible, I’d jump on a plane and join you. But if you take a second to consider it, you’ll realise that it’s not. I don’t have the money for such a trip. I won’t borrow it from you. And if I had, it takes weeks to get a visa…”

“I’m sorry.” Edward winces again, fingers pressed on his eyes as if this might settle his whirling thoughts. “I was being horribly selfish.”

“I want to go north with you. I’ve always wanted that. I guess the UL will have to do in the meantime.”

Edward laughs in spite of himself.

“What with the bunker-like architecture and the lack of light, it’s not so different from the Russian Arctic,” he says.

“For future reference,” Jopson says, “I miss you.”

Edward hums. “I wouldn’t have been standing in subzero temperatures for the past ten minutes if I didn’t.”

“Edward, for crying out loud. Get inside.”

Once the dancing starts there is no way to avoid it - one must commit to the throng or head out, and Edward has already spent far longer in the cold than he should have.

He lets Natalia pull him by the sleeve towards where they are all dancing together. Her cheeks and nose are beetroot red, which is rather unsurprising given that she was on her sixth or seventh straight vodka when he’d left. She isn’t so much moving as letting herself be moved by the swaying crowd. 

Sophia meanwhile seems to be dancing to a tune of her own, with an eerie sort of grace, movements supple and light, in stark contrast with Anton whose head and shoulders and hips jerk to the fast rhythm of a frazzled pop song, whose arms lift in unison with those of his neighbours. 

George is happily working his way through a choreography that would be more at home in the 70s, not that Edward minds it, past an initial moment of open-mouthed stupor - and for a while he even dances along, accepting George’s smile with a straight face even as inside him something subsides like ice breaking away from the pack, some of his wariness, part of his reluctance.

When they stumble out in the snow at two in the morning, in the shadowy daylight, George says they should do it again the following month, and promptly doubles over a snowdrift to puke his guts out. Natalia is heading back to the station, where Edward is starting to suspect she might live, although she spins them a story about an early meeting with a team of engineers at the military compound. George volunteers to meet her there to make magnetic measurements, though he says it while swaying on his feet and no one gives him much credence.

Eventually they hail him a taxi and after some confusion, due to Anton trying to get Sophia to wait for another one in his drunken and somewhat overbearing company and to Edward weighing the fifteen minute walk by -10 degrees against the smell of puke in the taxi, everyone climbs into the car, save Natalia.

She watches them drive off with her usual blank face, a hand half-raised in farewell. The gesture stays with Edward for the better part of the drive because of how odd it had looked, stiff and a bit shy, suggesting something else than the tough and distinctly mocking woman he’s come to know.

When the taxi stops outside Edward’s flat Sophia gets out after him, too swiftly for anyone inside the car to react. As soon as the taxi begins to drive off her hand is on Edward’s elbow and she pleads, “Let’s go in. Let’s go in now in case he doubles back.”

Edward doesn’t need her to say it twice. They hurry into the deserted hall even as he sees the taxi slow down further up the road, and whatever happens next, there’s a door between them and Anton, and soon another as they reach the antiquated lift.

“I’ll head back out in a minute,” Sophia says. She sounds deeply embarrassed, and in the lift she stands opposite Edward, arms crossed protectively across her chest. “He just needs to sober up. I don’t think he’ll react badly to me ending things, but I’d rather do it in the morning, when he’s not thoroughly smashed.”

Edward shakes his head in disbelief.

“Don’t be ridiculous. I’m not sending you home, you can stay here. Anton will assume there’s something going on between us, that’s all.”

“Between us?” Sophia laughs lightly as she follows him inside his flat. 

“I’m glad the idea amuses you.”

He pours them each a glass of water as Sophia gets rid of most of her layers, the raincoat and the fleece and the jumper beneath, until it’s only the midnight-blue dress she was wearing at the club, faintly sparkling in the light of his desk lamp. The block-out curtains are drawn and one could almost believe that it’s night outside, and not the strange and endless dawn of a late Arctic spring.

“You’re not interested in girls, are you?” she says.

“Attracted. I can assure you I find you very interesting,” Edward replies, with a flash of a smile.

“Of course you’d be a punctilious drunk,” she mutters, sinking down on his bed, holding her glass of water aloft. Edward takes it from her and sets it on the bedside table.

He can’t fault her for choosing the bed: there’s only one room in the flat, with a kitchen corner and a table with two chairs, and a tiny bathroom behind a sliding door, but no living area and certainly no couch.

“Is it something you’ve always known about me?” he asks, feeling curious but at a distance, as if they weren’t talking about him but about some other Edward, a man that people might readily notice and gossip about.

Sophia gazes up at him as she ponders the question, blonde bun coming undone on his pillow, the faint smudge of mascara making her blue eyes seem lighter, brighter, unless that’s also the alcohol. He’s never seen her look so relaxed, curled on her side with her hands under her cheek like they’re about to embark on the world’s strangest sleep-over.

“I saw you with that other boy,” she says. “What was his name? Cornelius Hickey’s friend. The one that looked like he should have been playing rugby.”

Edward huffs.

“Solomon. Solomon Tozer.”

“I was in Francis’ office… This was years and years ago. He walked you to the door. You only noticed me when you came in, and I pretended I hadn’t seen anything.” She pushes herself up and reaches for her glass of water. “It wasn’t any of my business. But I was happy for you. That you had someone. You’ve always been such a strange creature - Francis used to think he could rely on you all the time because you didn’t really want to be anywhere else, and maybe he wasn’t wrong… I know James scolded him about it, eventually. Pointing out that you had friends. ‘Acquaintances’, Francis said. ‘The boy seems decided to keep everyone at a distance.’” 

Edward can’t hold back a laugh at her rather impressive imitation of Crozier’s Irish drawl. 

“He was genuinely pleased when you and Thomas Jopson hit it off,” Sophia says. “What happened? Between you and Solomon. If you want to tell me, of course.”

Edward tries not to topple over as he sets his glass down on the floor by the bed. The old mattress sinks as he sits back down. 

“Will you tell me what happened between you and Francis?”

Sophia casts him a sly look.

“Deal.”

Edward has a precise memory of the day she mentioned, in part because, contrary to what she might be thinking, it had been a rather isolated incident. He’d had work to do in Crozier’s office and Sol had walked him there, as if he needed to guard him from something, and when they’d been about to part ways on the doorstep, Sol had leaned in fast and kissed Edward on the mouth. It had lasted a second, and yet Edward won’t ever be able to scrape the feel of it, no matter how hard he tries.

“We were idiots about it for years,” he says. “Then he left to do his PhD in Scotland, and we never even… We didn’t say goodbye, or anything. We kept in touch, on and off. A couple years after that, maybe, we ended up being in Canada at the same time. I was with that Arctic expedition and he was following Hickey in his crusade against Francis. When I decided to go to Russia, Sol left Hickey for me. For a few weeks, at least. Then he went back. It feels strange to sum it up like this… You realise how there’s no logic to the span of a relationship. Five seconds or three weeks that can upend your entire life, and in between it’s months and years of…” He shakes his head. “Not nothing. Other things, I suppose.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine,” Edward says. “It was ten years ago. We’ve both moved on.” He has a self-deprecatory smile. “I’ve had numerous break-ups since then.” One-night stands and Tinder dates and ill-advised flings with work colleagues - and one long-term relationship, with Grant, from Anchorage. None of these had been as traumatising as they unraveled as the claustrophobic fights with Sol in the flat in Murmansk.

Edward has a shiver of relief when he thinks of Jopson refusing his invitation.

“Your turn,” he says, turning slightly to look at her. Sophia has sunk back down onto his pillow. She musters a brief smile.

“Francis idealised me. It’s never a good foundation for a relationship. And I did love him, but… I had my aunt and uncle on the one hand, who knew Francis very well and kept coming at me with reasons why it would be a bad idea, and I didn’t want my relationship with him to be an act of rebellion. I wasn’t sure what I felt. I suppose I… I did love him, but I couldn’t take on all of it. The drinking, the restlessness. I could see a future where I tried to help him and I lost everything else. My work was always going to come first. And… really, I still don’t think I was wrong. He’s still one of my closest friends, and one of the people who knows me best. It makes things weird, sometimes.”

“It’s easy, isn’t it,” Edward murmurs, fingers idly drumming against the blanket, “to talk about these things years down the line.”

“Where is he now? Solomon?”

Edward’s hand stills. After a tentative silence, he says, “Australia. He’s not the writing type, but he calls, sometimes.”

For a moment he thinks she’ll press him further, and then he realises that she’s fallen asleep.


	10. the end of the table, 2006

Sometimes, after an outing, the crew would have breakfast together in the hall. Rowing was quite obviously the glue that held them all together. Some of the guys Edward had never had a conversation with that went beyond platitudes about their gear or their general area of study, and some of them he couldn’t stand. This included Hickey and, to a lesser extent, Des Voeux and Armitage. Des Voeux’s idea of team spirit involved being disdainful to everyone who was not on the team, which included the college’s female crews. If Des Voeux had had his say, the women’s second boat would have been appropriated as a third boat for the men. 

Armitage, like Sol, belonged to the men’s second boat, M2. Edward had been asked on occasion to sub for M2’s coach. Armitage had a problem with authority in general and Edward’s authority in particular.

One morning when Edward was still an undergrad, the crews of M1 and W1 had breakfast together, after they’d rowed at close intervals. Sol and Armitage were there, having been called in to replace rowers on the first boat. Edward was tired and cranky and ill-at-ease, nibbling dispiritedly at his eggs and refusing to engage in a conversation regarding the quality of university food. He’d chosen to sit at the end of the table and now he regretted it, because he’d have had an easier time making conversation with Irving and Elizabeth Marlowe, the captain of the women’s team, who was planning a gap year doing humanitarian work in the Himalayas. The last time they'd been seated next to each other, Edward and Elizabeth had started to discuss a joint project on settlements in high altitude. The prospect of pursuing that discussion seemed far more pleasant than Edward's current predicament.

He could only blame himself, however, for how he’d gone along with Sol pulling back a chair for him, and now he was responding to Sol’s arm along the back of the chair, despite the fact that their last meaningful interaction had occurred a week prior, when Sol had hugged him after a race. The impulsive kiss outside Crozier’s office had not been referred to again.

“You have no idea where the meat comes from,” Susanna Ford was saying. Whenever Edward sat in Susanna’s vicinity at a boat club meet, he’d noticed that the conversation always circled back to food-related subjects. In addition to being a vocal vegetarian, Susanna was working on the frighteningly-large subject of “food production for mass consumption in the 21st century”.

“As long as it tastes good, you know I don’t really care,” Armitage said.

It was often difficult to say if Armitage was being provocative or if he was just that much of a self-centred arse.

“Have you noticed,” Hickey piped up, “that there’s always a table hierarchy when we do these things? It’s the captains at one end, with each boat’s stroke and bow and seven, then the middle rowers and bow pair, finishing with the coxes,” he gestured with his fork, “Susanna and me, and then of course the second boat.”

“You don’t want to sit in John’s chair,” Armitage said, with a pointed look in Irving’s direction. “I bet it’s terribly uncomfortable. There has got to be a reason why he’s so stuck up.”

“At least the men and women mix up,” Susanna said. “And you’re leaving out Edward. Edward’s seven on M1, so by your reasoning, he should be sitting with John and Lizzie.”

“Little is only gracing us with his presence because Solomon is here,” Hickey said. “Have you noticed, Sol, that although you’re stroke on the M2 boat, you often replace the middle rowers on the first boat? One boat values your leading skills, the second your brute strength. And Edward being seven is interesting in itself - seven has to follow the rhythm set by stroke and transmit it to the rest of the boat. They’re natural followers. Good lieutenants, rarely good captains.”

“Eight am is still too early for your nonsense, Hickey,” Edward sighed, rubbing his jaw. Sol’s knee bumped against his under the table.

“For what it’s worth, I do appreciate that you came to sit with us, Edward,” Hickey said, with one of his patented swings from pleasant aggression to pleasant seduction. “If you’re Solomon’s friend, you’re my friend.”

It was a harrowing thought, which caused Edward to wonder if him and Sol were, in fact, friends. Their relationship was too uncertain for him to consider giving Sol an ultimatum between Hickey and himself.

And when he eventually did so, three years later, Sol did choose Hickey, in spite of all that had transpired of Hickey’s nature and crimes - chose to hear him out in the name of friendship and what he’d always called Hickey’s “cleverness”, and which Edward, less charitably, referred to as Hickey’s “Machiavellian bullshit”.


	11. the swimming bear at dawn, 2019

“You don’t sleep much, do you?” 

Edward rolls over to find Sophia looking at him, mostly awake, with the faint line of a pillow crease across her cheek.

”Better than I used to. Coffee?”

They’re both slightly hungover, but not so much that it justifies lying down, and so they put up a pretence of efficiency, with Edward making coffee while Sophia takes a shower, and when he emerges from the bathroom in turn he finds breakfast on the table, or whatever she could make with what was at hand, eggs and an even share of the last of his cereal.

“I borrowed one of your jumpers,” she says, appropriating the second of his two chairs. “I hope that’s alright?”

Edward looks up from his cereal.

“That’s Jopson’s,” he says evenly.

Sophia goes utterly still, after which she quickly reaches down to remove the navy blue jumper, her cheeks a dark pink.

“Oh my god. I’m sorry, I didn’t…”

“Sophia, don’t. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind. I didn’t...” Edward clears his throat. “By the time I left there were quite a few of his things lying around, and I started packing ridiculously late. I didn’t mean to steal his clothes.”

Sophia’s face registers a flicker of doubt.

”Are you...”

“Yes,” Edward says.

He wouldn’t know how to define his relationship with Jopson, exactly - he has only ever “dated” Grant and his handful of Tinder dates, and what he has with Jopson is at once far clearer and infinitely more complicated than those relationships had been. The fact that this thing between them has taken root so deep so fast while remaining as liable to break as glassware regularly serves to fuel his bouts of insomnia.

“Edward, I’m glad.” 

He gives her a quizzical look but Sophia seems quite sincere.

“You need someone good in your life. Someone who’ll fight for you if they have to.”

“Wouldn’t you say… And I’m not seeking reassurance here...” Edward picks his words carefully. “Wouldn’t you say that he deserves someone less likely to fuck up?”

Sophia swats his arm.

“I don’t do pep talks, so you’ll only hear this once. You are a good person, Edward. You’re a good person that fucks up. There’s certainly a scale and it probably ranges from Thomas Jopson to Francis in terms of the scale of the fuck ups, but you can rest assured that at present, you’re safe somewhere in the middle. And as to what Thomas deserves, I’d say he deserves a shot at whomever he wants, and as far as I know, that’s always been you.”

Edward stares at her a moment in bewildered silence, and then he raises his mug and knocks it against hers.

“To us good people?”

Sophia nods.

“To us, good people.”

Sophia has a day off work and Edward, who hasn’t taken one since he arrived in Russia, decides to follow suit. It’s Sophia who suggests they go swimming, like they would cross an item off a North Pole bucket list.

There’s mist rising off the water, patches of ice glinting in places. The temperature of the air is above zero but that hardly makes it warm. Edward’s teeth are already clicking together as he follows Sophia down to the water - more like a hole in the ice than a proper pond, and it’s only the people wading in and out that lure them on, young and old, some at a slow pace and some rushing in with conquering cries that quickly turn to shrieks and laughter. The pond and the saunas nearby are manned by the Swimming Bear club, which encourages swimming in all seasons including in the heart of the Arctic winter. When the swimmers are done, they retreat to the saunas, running across the ice in swimsuits that would not look out of place in warmer climes.

“Ready?” Sophia asks him. 

“Remind me why we’re doing this,” Edward stammers, with his arms crossed over his bare chest and every hair on his body standing on end.

“I’m doing it because someone told me, once, that I didn’t know what adventure was. You’re doing it because I asked you. Here.” She holds out her hand. “On three.”

_What will it feel like?_ Edward wonders, as he grasps her hand. _Needles? Knives? Instant death?_ He half-runs, half-stumbles behind her still feeling somewhat drunk and maybe like he’s dissociating - the pale, lanky British man in dark swim shorts that he left behind was Edward Little, but who is this idiot plunging into ice-cold water under the steely Arctic sky, _Jesus holy fuck, death would be kinder_, and surely he’ll never not be shaking ever again - wheezing with laughter as he holds on to Sophia’s waist and they try to step out together, slipping and sliding on wet snow. 

This outing will probably be among Edward’s favourite memories of this trip, one day - for the time being however, it’s somewhat hard to look past its absurd conclusion: stepping out of the sauna to bump into Anton coming in, black beard dripping onto his broad chest, blue eyes widening in recognition - and whether the ice has cleared Anton’s head or not, he seems to decide this is an opportune time to avenge a perceived slight to his honour, or virility, or bruised feelings.

Edward evades Anton’s first swing, but in doing so he slips upon the ice, pitching his body forward to try and keep his balance. The second swing catches him square in the face.


	12. annual dinner of the boat club, 2015

Irving nervously adjusted the cuffs of his blazer.

“Thanks for coming, Little. I really appreciate it. It wouldn’t mean as much if you weren’t here.”

“How sappy of you,” Edward said, and that was the end of it, and throughout the evening he slid right back into his part as a Cambridge alumnus without needing to tell most of the attendees that he’d flown back from Alaska for this, or the more embarrassing truth, that he’d jumped on the occasion to fly back.

Grant had gaped at him when he’d told him about it.

_You’re going back to England because your friend is… donating a boat to your old school?_

_One of my best friends is donating a boat to my college boat club,_ Edward had corrected, well aware that he was at his poshest, most infuriatingly British, the out-of-touch-with-reality, born-with-a-silver-spoon-and-a-stiff-upper-lip facade he could assume so easily because it wasn’t exactly one.

But at that point Grant annoyed him so much he was finding it harder and harder to be anything but a snotty bastard. Some of it was Grant’s fault and some of it wasn’t; at any rate, Irving’s sudden display of generosity towards the boat club provided him with a perfect excuse to prove to Grant that this thing between them could no longer work. (And had, perhaps, never worked, though this wasn’t something that Edward felt like delving into, for it would have forced him to consider how he might have wasted the last of his twenties assuming that boredom and low spirits were his lot in life.)

“Are you coming back, then?” Gore asked him as they took their places at the high table, some way down from Irving and with two empty seats on Edward’s right-hand side.

“To Cambridge?” Edward shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t know yet.” In fact he had a meeting with the faculty in the morning and possibly with his former PhD supervisor. He hadn’t told Grant about that.

Like Irving, Gore had recently got engaged. His current, high-paying job involved sorting out the legal difficulties of several oil companies.

“Edward Little,” Gore smiled. “I remember how you’d always beat us to the river in the morning. Fairholme used to say you didn’t sleep.”

“It’s a rule of college life that you shouldn’t have a normal sleep schedule,” Edward said, leaving out the fact that his sleeping schedule had got worse after university, not better.

Gore glanced up and froze. “Look who’s here,” he said.

Edward followed his gaze and at first all he could see was Cornelius Hickey, wearing a blazer that looked a size too big for him. Edward’s initial, uncharitable thought was that Hickey must have stolen the thing, though surely there were a few people he could have borrowed it from. Since Edward had seen him last, Hickey had grown a short goatee and he now wore his red hair combed backwards, but the changes were negligible. He had the sort of face you didn’t forget.

And following a few feet behind Hickey was Sol. The last time Edward had spoken to him, he’d been heading out of the baggage claim at Heathrow or Gatwick, on his way to catch a train back to Scotland, and he’d turned back one last time to say,_ You look after yourself, Edward._

As with Hickey the changes were superficial. When they were undergrads Sol’s hair had been slightly too long, curling over his forehead, and back in Murmansk he’d been sporting a wild bush of a beard that he’d grown during his Canadian travels. Now that he’d cut his hair short he looked, more than ever, like he’d stepped out of a recruitment poster for the army. His blazer fit him a hell of a lot better than Hickey’s.

“Do you want to swap seats?”

“What?”

“Do you want to swap with me, so you won’t be sitting next to Hickey?” Gore repeated.

“What is he going to do to me?” Edward scoffed. “Steal my research? He’s welcome to it, it’s going nowhere.”

“Little!” Hickey exclaimed, pulling back the chair beside Edward’s. “It’s been a while.”

Sol’s voice fell between them.

“I’ll take this one, if you don’t mind.”

Hickey’s eyes went from Sol to Edward to the chair in front of him. He let go of it.

“But of course. You two must have a lot to catch up on.”

Sol nodded to Edward and even attempted a tense, close-lipped smile that Edward was in no capacity to return.

What followed was one of the most excruciating dinners of his life. Once all the official speeches were done and over with, he took to giving regular kicks in Gore’s direction so he’d kickstart the conversation when it floundered, with this disagreeable side-effect that Edward learned far more about Sol’s new life than he wanted to: Sol had finished his PhD in neuroscience in Edinburgh and had then moved to Australia, he’d met a guy there and they were going to cross the desert together the following spring, he was doing alright, no, he hadn’t flown from Australia just for the purpose of attending this dinner. He was spending the month in London.

And one seat away from Sol, Hickey smirked his usual smirks and peppered the talk with his soft-voiced repartees - _How’s Professor Crozier, Little? Do you really think there’s a future in geography for a specialist of Arctic urbanisation, given the decline in population in the far north? Have you heard from Jopson at all since you kicked him from the expedition? Weren’t you close friends, back then, Jopson and you - one could even say brothers, Francis Crozier’s adopted sons…_

When at last the dessert plates were cleared away, Edward took advantage of the temporary lapse before the trays of tea and coffee rolled in. He fled the high table with little more than a mumbled apology and his pack of cigarettes.

He wasn’t exactly surprised when Sol joined him in the garden outside the hall. A gust of cool wind rustled the leaves of the maple tree. Higher up, a little bat was flying in wild whooping circles. It reminded Edward of home, of the sprawling house in the countryside where he’d spent his early childhood. Sol stepped away from the building, hands balled in the pockets of his trousers. When he spoke, he wasn’t quite looking at Edward.

“How are you doing, really?”

“How the fuck do you stand him on a regular basis?” Edward replied, voice flat.

“I don’t,” Sol said. “Hadn’t seen him in six years. Didn’t change much, though, did he?”

Edward breathed out a puff of smoke and immediately took another drag.

“What a rat.”

“How are you doing, Edward?”

Edward considered the question, and whether Sol deserved another answer than the one he’d given Gore and his old coach and the rest of the crew.

“I’m in a bit of a slump,” he admitted. “But I’m taking steps to change that.”

“Professionally?”

“On whatever front you want to look at it. I don’t think Alaska has been doing me much good.”

“Doesn’t show,” Sol said, taking the cigarette from Edward’s unresisting fingers. “You look better than you used to.”

Edward merely stared at him, and by the time he thought to answer, it was far too late to do so without looking like a complete idiot.

“How are you doing?” he asked at last.

“Alright, really,” Sol said. “Can I ask you a question?”

Edward accepted the cigarette.

“Shoot.”

“If you could do something differently. Anything in the last ten years. What would that be?”

Although Edward wasn’t the kind to answer a question without carefully weighing what he’d say, he’d had time to ponder this particular problem.

“Nunavut.” He shrugged. “I shouldn’t have gone along with the expedition, not once Crozier had left… I should have followed him to Canada, helped him deal with your friend Hickey. I should have taken Jopson along for the ride. I’m not sure my research would have fared better. My self-esteem would have. I don’t know what happened to my moral compass back then. Some magnetic distortion. A lack of guts.”

“If you hadn’t gone to Nunavut, we’d never have been to Murmansk,” Sol pointed out.

“No, we wouldn’t have.” Edward’s smile was so strained he feared he’d pull a muscle. “If you want my honest opinion, we should have given this a proper try when we were bright young undergrads and not once we were in the middle of the Arctic. We were both in a tailspin, right? You over Hickey and his plagiarism and his nightmarish takes on Inuit culture and his general.. hickeyness… And me over Nunavut. You weren’t eating and I wasn’t sleeping and it worries me that those three weeks were still one of the high points of my life.”

Sol huffed. “Yeah. Yeah, same here.”

“What about you? Would you change anything?”

Sol hummed.

“Murmansk. Hickey’s mess was Hickey’s mess, and I don’t regret moving away from here. It got oppressive after a while. A golden bubble filled with anything but oxygen. I’m not saying I’ll spend my life in Australia, but it’s better than this. So yeah. I’d go back to that day I joined you in Murmansk, and I’d take you home.”

The cigarette having died out there was nothing to hide behind, so Edward just said, “What?”

“If I’d been a better person, I’d have put my foot down the moment I got there and saw how badly you were doing,” Sol said. “You’d just quit those sleeping pills... You looked like a badger with the rings under your eyes. Sometimes you couldn’t walk straight and yeah, you didn’t sleep. It was more like passing out after too many nights without sleeping. You were worked up over leaving those guys in Nunavut, you were in a state about Crozier, you kept saying you were a colossal failure who’d let everyone down in the name of a PhD you’d never finish. It was obvious you had anxiety issues and some sort of depression and it wasn’t gonna help you to spend a month in a foreign country in a flat that looked like the inside of a shoebox. And instead of dragging you home, I decided it was a good idea to spend three weeks in bed with you. I’m sorry, about that. I was a bloody idiot. Sometimes I think it’s a miracle we didn’t lose our minds back there.”

“I never saw it that way,” Edward said, letting the words rush out before he could think to hold them in. “I was alone there and then I wasn’t. I’ll always be grateful for that.”

He considered his empty pack of cigarettes. A group of students walked past, headed back to their rooms, with plastic bags swinging from their hands. Some were smoking. The bags echoed with the sound of bottles knocking together. Edward looked at them and for the span of a breath he would have traded anything to be a student again, young and hopeful and with the fallout of his choices ahead of him rather than behind. Yet the moment didn’t last, and he realised to his own surprise that in spite of it all, he hadn’t lost all hope.

There was that meeting with the Department of Geography tomorrow, and Irving giving away boats and Gore getting married and Sol cutting ties with Hickey and that email from Crozier that he hadn’t opened yet, the one titled _Nunavut 2016?_.

“Should we go in?” he asked.

“Sure.”

At the door Sol turned back, his hand on Edward’s upper arm.

“Hey. You’re worth better than whatever you’re putting yourself through, you know that, right? Hickey was wrong about you.”

“Which part?” Edward asked him, eyebrows raised, a bit petulantly maybe, the sudden contact going to his head like a glass of champagne.

“You’re not empty or dull,” Sol said. “You’re a clever bastard with a weird passion for the Arctic and that’s a strong selling point, not a flaw. And you look good. I was always so damn pleased when you guys called me in to replace someone. They’d usually have me row behind you. I got so hard at times it was embarrassing.”

“Laying it on thick,” Edward said, his face burning.

“Yeah, but I think you needed to hear it.”

“You know I also think that…”

“Don’t,” Sol said. “We both need this to be a goodbye, yeah? Let’s not…”

“You’re right,” Edward hurried to say. “I’m awfully sorry. I’ll just…”

Sol hauled him roughly forwards.

For years after that, whenever Edward drank the kind of strong, full-bodied red wine that they’d served at the party, he’d think of that parting kiss. His relationship with Sol bracketed by these two impulses, the clumsy first kiss on Crozier’s doorstep and that last one in the college gardens, a mere handful of seconds each time, Edward’s world tilting wildly on its axis before it righted itself.

In between was their strange disjointed friendship and Murmansk like a dark dream, memories of his nails digging into his palm as he bit back a scream, pleasure hitting his exhausted body like a punch in the gut so that he’d come and pass out with Sol still inside him, thinking it wouldn’t matter so much if he died just then, it would be preferable, perhaps, better than waking frightened and forever tired and starting all over again.

Someone cleared their throat in the arched passageway behind them.

“I was thinking…”

Hickey stopped short. Whether it was something he saw in Sol’s face or in Edward’s, he took a cautious step back, smile fading away and returning as a shadow of what it had been, as if he’d decided to neutralise it. They would never learn what it was that he’d been thinking.

“Irving’s drunk,” he said. “Maybe for the first time in his life? He was looking for you, Edward.”

“Have a good evening, Cornelius,” Sol said, guiding Edward through the door with a hand at his back.

They spent the rest of the evening looking after Irving, and there wasn’t much else said about their university years, or about their respective lives. It was only Sol smiling before they went their separate ways, after they’d exchanged phone numbers and promised to stay in touch should Sol and his partner make it through their desert trek, and as he hoisted Irving’s arm over his shoulder, preparing to walk him to the Uber waiting across the street, Sol called back, “You look after yourself, Edward.”


	13. a conference call, 2019

Edward hasn’t received a beating since the time he was mugged in Cambridge, some three years back. That’s a measure of comfort, at least - Anton’s right hook doesn’t hurt half as much as that assault had, when the mugger kicked him off his bike and knocked him out with God knows what, a tire iron or a bicycle lock or whatever was at hand.

He’d come to at the hospital with Crozier and Irving watching over him - Irving had taken the train from London, because Edward had long ago listed him as his next of kin, after a disagreeable episode at school where he broke his ankle and neither of his parents would make the half-hour trip to the hospital.

Crozier had seen far worse in his lifetime than Edward with his puffed lip and the five stitches on the crown of his head - but he’d still been pale as a sheet and before he left he gripped Edward’s hand tight without saying a word. Edward hadn’t seen him so distraught since the early days - the early years - back when Crozier still drank.

It had forced him to reevaluate a few things, amongst which his long-held idea that Crozier thought of him as a valuable colleague, and not, as Jopson sometimes put it, as a surrogate son.

“You’ll be alright,” Natalia tells him, pushing the pack of ice against his eye and telling Sophia to hold it there.

Sophia’s hand is still shaking with repressed fury. Edward only has the vaguest recollection of the scene, as he’d been rather out of it at that point, but he did hear her shouting at Anton, and he’d seen Anton back down before the violence of her words. Sophia’s Russian is sufficiently proficient that her tirade carried weight, and in case that wasn’t enough, she’d thrown in the promise of “getting Kolya involved” if Anton ever approached Edward again. Edward has only met Sophia’s friend from the military base once, but it was enough for the guy to thoroughly creep him out. He doesn’t doubt the validity of her threat.

“You have to be careful,” Natalia says, in her usual, even tones, reverting to Russian as she often does when it’s only the three of them. “This isn’t a big city. Less people will find out about you. Those who do will care more.”

“Find out about me?” Edward repeats.

“We’re not…”, Sophia says, but Natalia shakes her head.

Sophia stares uncomprehendingly for a second. Her eyes harden.

“There is nothing to find out,” she says. “Whatever you’ve been told about Edward, that’s not what this fight was about. Anton thought Edward and I were seeing each other. That’s all it was. A misunderstanding. Who was it? Who told you stories about Edward?”

“George, obviously,” Edward says, replacing Sophia’s hand with his own so he can readjust the ice pack.

“George doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

“It’s all the same to me.” Natalia’s voice has grown cold. “As a friend, I thought you should know, and so I am warning you.”

“Oh, I do know,” Edward scoffs. “It makes it twice as funny that Anton should think that I stole his girlfriend.” He wills himself to turn his grimace into a smile. “Thank you, all the same.”

“I’ll talk to George,” Sophia declares, which doesn’t bode well for George.

“I’ll make tea,” Natalia adds. “Keep that on your eye.”

Edward takes a look at his phone, making a rough calculation of the time difference before he calls Jopson.

Crozier’s office is filled with golden light. Jopson is standing with his back to a bookshelf that Edward’s perused on many occasions, and which they’d spent an afternoon rearranging once when Crozier had failed to show up for a tutoring session. Travel narratives only, ranked by their outcome, from least to most tragic.

“Edward,” Jopson says, blue eyes wide, the smile wiped clean off his face as Edward’s camera finally catches on and reveals the ice pack covering one half of his face. “What happened?”

“Nothing, really,” Edward says. “A squabble at the sauna. I thought it might be better to tell you now rather than to spring it on you tonight. It would have ruined the mood.”

“How bad is it? Show me.”

Edward lifts the ice pack and catches a glimpse of the damage in the small window at the bottom of the screen - the skin around his eye turning a deep purple, several shades darker already than it had been when he’d looked at himself in the rearview mirror of Sophia’s car.

“Jesus,” Jopson says.

“What is it?” comes Crozier’s familiar voice, from somewhere beyond the screen.

Edward immediately tries to work backwards through the conversation, worrying that he might have said something embarrassing.

“Someone punched Edward in the face,” Jopson says.

A few seconds later Crozier’s bemused face appears besides Jopson’s on the screen.

“Edward, what the hell happened to you?”

The reproachful tone, Edward has learned, is merely Crozier’s way of expressing heartfelt concern.

“An angry Russian is what happened to me. I’ll be fine.”

“In a few days, you should trade the ice for a warm compress,” Jopson tells him, “but make sure it’s not too warm - do you have any paracetamol at hand? Ibuprofen?”

“We have vodka,” Sophia says, leaning down over Edward’s shoulder. “Hello Thomas. Francis.”

“Dr Cracroft.”

Crozier has an unguarded smile, but this isn’t it - this is his mocking, protecting-the-unspoken-truth-at-all-costs smile.

“Look after the boy for me, will you,” Crozier says.

Edward, who has gone fourteen years without once being infantilized by Crozier, tries a grimace that pulls at all the wrong muscles in his bruised face.

“I will look after your thirty-three-year-old child, Francis,” Sophia promises, patting Edward’s shoulder. “Don’t you worry.”

“So. How’s your research going, the both of you?” Crozier asks.


	14. krasnoyarsk krai, 2019 / nunavut, 2009

Anna takes him to the airport, because her jeep is equipped to drive on terrible roads and Edward’s car is not. They’d been introduced to George’s girlfriend the week prior, when she came up from Moscow for a prolonged visit. George and her had met at university, after he’d asked her for directions to a lecture room and she had laughed at his terrible accent.

Above their heads the sky is coloured in layers, mother-of-pearl under a pale peach-like hue under a rich saffron. On each side of the uneven road the snow banks are tinged green, pale as lichen in the light, and the darker green of ponds in the shade.

Edward drank two cups of coffee before leaving but he’s still half-asleep and grateful for Anna’s alertness.

“We might be a little late,” she warns him in English. “I don’t want to drive too fast on this road.”

“I’d rather get there late than die buried in a snow-drift. Take all the time you need.”

The only thing that betrays Edward’s restlessness is the quick tapping of his fingers on his leg. He was taught early on that feelings aren’t meant to be expressed, that having a cool, measured approach to every situation is the only thing that will get him anywhere in life. This belief had been somewhat shaken when he’d met Francis Crozier - Crozier who expresses everything regardless of what it might cost him, regardless of how it will be perceived, on the grounds that in life clarity makes the difference between life and death, even if at times clarity means telling James Fitzjames that he’s behaving like an obnoxious prat or proclaiming to the esteemed John Franklin that his expedition plan is, “with all due respect, laughable”.

Edward can’t shake the impression that he grew up stunted somehow, though he wouldn’t know how to act upon it now. After Nunavut and the holiday he’d spent at James’ house, James had provided him with the name of a friend of his who specialised in behavioral therapy. The therapy helped in the aftermath of the expedition, at least with Edward’s sleeping issues. He’d stopped going at the eve of his trip to Greenland, before they could broach other, more deeply entrenched issues.

Possibly minutes away from seeing Thomas, Edward can tell that he’s anxious, but he couldn’t say if he’s impatient to see Thomas arrive, or if he’s afraid that it’ll all go to hell in a handbasket the moment he gets there.

They reach the airport twenty minutes after the plane was scheduled to arrive. Edward is running towards the doors, several apologies already on the tip of his tongue, when he recognises Thomas’ old black coat and his equally faded beanie.

He’s waiting outside with his backpack at his feet, taking in the scenery - the radiance of the light and air and ice and sky - prolonging that first glimpse of the Arctic where - whether the air is clear or foggy - the nature of the landscape is made physical at once, in the palpable quiet that any sound could shatter like glass, in the softness of the pale colours, in the hazy blacks and whites that can turn so fast to jagged edges, to the harsh burn of the wind throwing fine shards of ice against your exposed skin.

“Thomas?”

Edward used to envy Crozier for every one of these diffident smiles - it had been no small wonder to discover that he could make Thomas smile as well, it’s as potent a miracle now as it was ten years ago.

“Thomas Jopson, finally reaching the Pole,” Edward grins. “Bill Wilson would be proud, though god knows there’s no penguins around here…”

Thomas clasps an arm around his shoulders and pulls him in for a hug that could be purely fraternal, save that it gives Edward a chance to breathe him in, eyes shut tight for as long as it lasts, with a swift brush of his knuckles across Thomas’ back - _There, there, I missed you too._

“I’m knackered,” Thomas says. “And you look like you could use some rest… How about we find ourselves a bed?”

“Yes,” Edward says, drawing it out, approval and relief mingled. “I have to warn you, however - we won’t be staying at my flat. You’re not missing out, it’s not particularly charming, and a better alternative presented itself.”

Natalia had said, “I have a room at the station, it will be less sad than that horrible flat of yours, and you wouldn’t have to hide him from any suspicious neighbours. You can use it.” When Edward politely declined, pointing out that he didn’t want to turn her out, she’d laughed at him. “The three of you think I live here? _At the station?_”

As it turns out, she has a flat in town, where she lives with her husband, who works at the military compound, and the youngest of her three children. The other two have moved south. After that conversation, she had them all over for tea, and Edward spent an entertaining two hours looking around Natalia’s heavily-furnished living-room, a welcome sight after three months in his own dismal lodgings, as George gave them a prolonged expose on the nature and frequency of Arctic storms.

Natalia keeps the room at the station for days when she wants to work late into the night, or would rather not drive home because she has been drinking and the drinking has made her drowsy. It isn’t much, a small bedroom next to the garage, on the opposite side from the main room and kitchen and the lab, with a bed and a shower and a surprising number of knick knacks that recreate the atmosphere of Natalia’s apartment on a smaller scale, wall-hangings woven with crosses and herringbone patterns, woodcuts and maps, books that cover everything from knot-making to Nabokov’s correspondence, lab coats and shawls, a large wooden chest filled with barometers and compasses and scales and a Mosin-Nagant rifle that would no doubt be of interest to James.

For all that he said he was tired, Thomas keeps a lively conversation going in the car, leaning forward in the backseat so that he can see Anna while he talks to her, and once they arrive at the station, he beats Edward to fixing her a coffee for the drive home, somehow figuring out the location of the coffee-maker and sugar ahead of being given a tour of the place (_You Facetimed me from the kitchen last week, remember?_).

Edward had braced himself for a full day of interacting with everyone, but the station is blessedly empty. A sheet of paper has appeared on the cork board in the kitchen.

_Sighting of Alyosha (the 3rd Karamazov) near the military base again, meeting Kolya there with the town vet. Won’t be back until tomorrow - you boys behave yourselves! x S_

_At lake station for measuring. Tea tomorrow at my house after work.  
Natalia Pavlova_

_Hello Edward,_  
_ Heading out to the lake station too, I’ll see you at Natalia’s tomorrow night. Looking forward to meeting Thomas._  
_ Cheers, George._

(From which Edward gathers that Sophia engineered this desertion, and that Natalia had convinced George that it was in his best interest to leave as well.)

Anna drinks the coffee and Edward sees her out, and suddenly the station is silent, and it’s only Thomas and him, with miles and miles of empty Arctic plains around them.

As is often the case between them, this reunion does not require much talking. Edward simply walks back inside and falls upon Thomas like the promised drink at the end of a long, arid walk, with hasty kisses and impatient hands, trying to make up for weeks of frustration in a matter of minutes. He almost expects a rebuke, for Thomas to hold him back and beg for a reprieve after the long journey.

What he gets instead is Thomas backing him against the table and holding his face in his hands as he kisses him, again and again until Edward’s mouth has been properly abused and he can feel himself leaning back, legs giving out. Thomas pushes him up onto the smooth tabletop, moving between his legs where Edward can have a better grip on his hair as he kisses him, on the firm slope of his shoulder under the faded t-shirt as Thomas’ hands slide up his thighs.

Edward could almost laugh at the absurdity of it, this rushed groping and grappling on a kitchen table, the sudden rush of close contact after months without. He’d envisioned many variations of such a scene, lying face-down on his bed, eyes screwed shut against the pillow, grinding against his hand with stern resolve at first, seeking a prompt release so he’d fall asleep - pragmatism turning to desperation as his mind conjured up ever more lurid thoughts, things he’d never dare ask Thomas because they belonged to some crude, savage dreamscape. Now he’s pushing back against Thomas, mumbling “Let me, let me turn around,” all thoughts of dignity or patience forgotten as he feels Thomas’s body drape over his back, the hard swell of his cock against his arse - and then he’s laughing, well and truly laughing, uncontrollably, letting his head drop between his arms on the table as his shoulders shake with it, Thomas’ hand buried in his hair - “Edward,” the indignation thoroughly undermined by the fact that the laughter is slowly contaminating him as well, “what the hell?”

“I’m just so damn happy you’re here,” he says, voice rising muffled from the circle of his arms. “Now would you please fuck me, as hard as you possibly can?”

_I'm thinking of moving back to Cambridge_, Thomas had told him. _I’d accept the professor’s offer, take up your old job as his assistant. I would find a room of course - I wouldn’t think of imposing..._

_The more I see you the better,_ Edward had replied, in a rare moment of outspoken candour. _The more you stay here the better, and I’ve become used to you hogging the bed._

The exact truth being, _I’ve become used to you in my bed - the weight and warmth and smell of you, the sprawl of your tall frame and long limbs, that way you have of trying to give me as much space as possible by sleeping at one end, until you fall asleep and forget and I wake up with your mouth on my neck and your leg thrown over mine, and I’d rather pretend to be asleep than confess to loving this feeling of being trapped by you._

Thomas’ most dangerous quality is his patience. Edward has long been used to rushed proceedings; each party getting what they craved and then beating a hasty retreat. Thomas can bring him to the very edge and coolly hold him back, again and again, denying himself in the process, with little appearance of strain save for the tension of his back muscles under Edward’s hands, or the brief moment of respite that he’ll allow himself, leaning his forehead against Edward’s as he lets out a quivering breath.

Edward had briefly dated a guy, once, who got off on making him beg for release, but this is different. Early on, he’d asked Thomas about it - _Do you want me to ask for it?_ \- ready to do it if Thomas told him to. _No, but if you want anything you can tell me,_ Thomas had said. And Edward, who was unused to voicing his wants as anything but periphrases - who was unused to voicing what he wanted - had let the words shudder against Thomas’ neck, _I want you inside me, I want to come with you inside me._

What Edward has known from the start, as far back as his school years, is that he would forsake much (would forsake everything) for that feeling of being worked open, of being taken over so completely that his body will just submit and the rigidity of his character - of his upbringing and morals - will be properly shattered.

It must be self-preservation, therefore, that often makes him speed up his sexual encounters as much as he can, so that this vulnerability won’t last and he won’t give too much of himself away. It had suited Grant, who carried along some sort of religious guilt when it came to sex and was all too happy to set new records for how fast he might fuck Edward and fall asleep. (And of course there had been Sol, who already knew far too much about Edward by the time they settled back to front on that single bed in Murmansk with little else in the room aside from Sol’s bag where he’d dropped it in the corner and the open jar of vaseline on the pillow).

There is much that Edward doesn’t know about Thomas, still, but this he does know: none of what happens between them will ever be turned against him, and it has him cling when he otherwise would have merely held on - it has him dig his heels in Thomas’ lower back to push him deeper inside, instead of merely meeting his thrusts. And when he feels a tremor running through Thomas’ body, Thomas’ cock pulsing inside him, he meets his gaze head on, lets himself be seen.

Afterwards they rearrange themselves on the bed much as they would have in Cambridge, Thomas with an arm flung over Edward’s stomach.

“I hope this station has a washing machine,” he murmurs, with a look at the stained bedsheets.

“The river outside is no longer frozen over,” Edward tells him. “We can go down there, I’ll fetch the soap.”

Thomas’ bemused expression startles a laugh out of him.

“It’s a joke. There is a washing machine, though the clothes don’t always come out the right size or colour, and there’s nothing to be done about it.”

Sitting up slightly, he casts about for his cigarettes.

“Here,” Thomas says, reaching down to retrieve the cigarette paper and tobacco from the floor.

“Thank you. We should probably try to stay awake, if we can. Otherwise we’ll end up jetlagged, the both of us.”

“A shower and more coffee, then.” Thomas’ eyes wander about the room, moving along the rows of books, stopping on the woodcuts, on the polar bear carved from a bit of ivory. “Does the… elaborate clutter of this room also remind you of…”

“Francis’ office? Yes.”

“Hm. Do you know, when we were at uni, I once had a very vivid sex dream about you, and it happened in that office?”

“I’m both appalled and completely unsurprised,” Edward says dryly, though he sets the cigarettes aside, reaches down to stroke Thomas’ hair. “What kind of dream was it then?” And with his usual half-smile: “Show me.”

Later, he suggests a walk, and Thomas agrees to it, but neither of them ends up leaving the bed. Edward knows about ten different kinds of exhaustion, some good and some bad - this is not one of the bad ones, this temporary death of motion, heavy limbs all but frozen to the bed, until finally some of his energy returns and he uses it to seek Thomas’ mouth with his own, to stroke Thomas’ palm until the pressure of Thomas’ hand reassures him that they are both awake - awake enough that this lazy coupling can resume for another hour or more, after which they will fall apart, too tired to move, until finally some of their energy returns and -

“I’ll make some coffee,” Thomas decides, and he does get up this time, blindly reaching for his trousers from the floor.

Eventually, Edward finds the courage to follow.

“When will I be allowed to go to bed?” Thomas asks him with a wry smile, as he nurses the mug between his hands. It’s one of George’s, with little clouds arranged according to their altitude, their names printed in a looping script. Nimbostratus, cumulus, stratocumulus. The hazy cirrostratus, the cirrocumulus like the pattern of dry, cracked earth, and at the very top, the filaments of the cirrus. Edward has spent many a morning half-awake, staring at the grey-white shapes as he tried to commit them to memory.

“I’m not going to hold you back if you decide to go to bed, but the longer you stay up, the better you’ll feel tomorrow. This being said, I also need to finish proofreading an article, so you could probably sleep all day tomorrow while I deal with that.”

“The article on migratory flows, or the one about processes of change and adaptation in Russian Arctic cities in the post-soviet era?”

Edward stares at him.

“I must talk about this a lot.”

“And you’ll never hear me complain,” Thomas smiles. “You can look forward to hearing me ramble about my Terra Nova watercolours during the next few weeks, anyways. I can’t exactly sit around and stare at the snow while you work.”

“I’ll be happy to listen to your rambles,” Edward says, with feeling. “I’d be equally happy if you did indeed take the opportunity to sit around and get some rest. And Sophia said she could take you along on a field trip to see her bears. George and Natalia said the same, but you might be more interested in the bears than in their meteorological measurements.”

“I’d like that. All of it.” Thomas looks down at the mug for a second and then back at Edward, blue eyes blinking tiredly. “I’m afraid I’ll have to save all this for another day, though.”

Edward smiles. “It’s fine. Do you want to go to bed? And I mean, go to bed and get some actual sleep.”

Thomas shakes his head. “I’ll try to hold on for another few hours if I can. Can’t you keep me distracted? Tell me a story.”

“A story?” Edward huffs. “What kind of story?”

“A story of polar exploration.”

He might have chosen another time. He might have chosen never to tell this story at all, and if he tried to explain it, he would have trouble figuring out exactly why he decided that this particular moment - this particular setting - were the right ones, in the little kitchen at the meteorological station, with the smell of coffee strong in the air and Thomas wearing that navy jumper Edward had packed by accident several months ago, and the Arctic waiting around them, the sun shining its endless summer light that would fade but never disappear completely.

“Ten years ago,” he begins, “a professor of anthropology at Cambridge University decided to... put together an expedition, to go to the Canadian territory of Nunavut. The expedition was to gather in Iqaluit, and then move on northwards, along Baffin Bay. Its members were to pursue a variety of fields of enquiry…”

Edward glances at Thomas long enough to ascertain that he’s listening. Holding his gaze any longer than that would mean facing a complicated set of emotions on both sides, which would bring this tale to an abrupt end. Instead he looks down at the dark dregs of his coffee and continues.

“... they had among them a meteorologist, a glaciologist, a geologist, a marine biologist and a microbiologist, a physicist and a geographer...” He stops. “As you know, the expedition leader had been… called away.”

“To Vancouver.”

“To Vancouver, yes. He said he’d be back whenever he could, but in the end he didn’t return. Aside from his attempts at dismantling Francis’ work, Hickey was building up this… scandal around Francis, bringing up his past alcoholism, accusing him of misallocating university funds to fuel his drinking and his travels. It all died out eventually, but too late for us. We were dropped by our main sponsor and we all had to chip in last minute, some of us more than others. I think it led to some thinking they had more of a say about how the expedition went than those who had been put in charge.” He shakes his head. “I’m not trying to find myself excuses. I didn’t want to be put in charge, and I didn’t try hard enough to… stir the expedition in the right direction, or in any direction, really. And I did speak up when they decided to leave you behind. I was overruled by Le Vesconte and his very rich father.”

“Alright,” Thomas says. “Grab your coffee. We’re taking this conversation back to bed.”

"Do you want to talk about it?", Sol had asked.

"What?"

"Nunavut."

"Do you want to talk about Hickey?"

Sol had put both hands over his eyes and made a sound somewhere between a sigh and a whine. He wore the same clothes he’d been wearing on the plane over, a red t-shirt and cargo pants. His brown hair curled about his face, falling into his eyes, the beard growing soft at his jaw and chin. He reminded Edward of a Shetland sheep. Edward had wanted to bury his face in Sol's hair and sleep a while, an hour or maybe ten years.

"No," Sol had said, at last. There was something hard and defensive about his look. "Do you want to fuck?"

Edward had returned the tired, angry stare. "Yes. You could have picked a better time. But sure. Let’s fuck."

“We had heard so much about the polar night,” he says. “Less so about the summer daylight. It did a number on all of us. I couldn’t sleep - I’d never had sleeping trouble before that. Suddenly I was up all the time, and so damn tired… It felt like being wired but also insubstantial. Like I was made of cotton candy and someone was pulling shreds out of me.”

He takes a drag of the cigarette and lets it rest against the ashtray, eyes on his raised knees, on Thomas’ hand on his thigh.

“After a week of that I started taking pills - they knocked me out. Pitch black sleep as if I’d died for a few hours. It terrified me. I ditched them the moment I got to Russia. The others weren’t doing much better. Without Francis we weren’t going out of our way to interact with people there... It was only Goodsir who managed to get invited by a local institute a week after we’d arrived, but it was six hours away by car, so we didn’t see him much once he’d gone back there with Silna. On our side…” He grimaces. “The entitled young elite of Cambridge. Drinking and partying and turning a research trip into an orgy. And even then we could barely stand each other. Close quarters like that - the weather outside was alright, bearable, but the places where we stayed were remote. Abandoned meteorological stations and deserted hunting and trading posts. The further we went, the more we left behind - books, laptops, most of the scientific equipment. I think we didn’t even know why we kept going on. It didn’t feel like we were getting anywhere. Rather like we were trying to outpace ourselves. After a while, Morfin and Hartnell became convinced we were being followed… Are you still awake?”

He doesn’t turn around to look, but Thomas’ hand moves up his leg in a soothing stroke.

“Go on.”

Edward takes a moment to light another cigarette.

“Before that, I’d never have thought that I could hate the daylight. But up there, I really did. I was afraid of that black hole I fell into when I slept, and I was afraid of the light when I woke up. I was afraid of the men I was travelling with. We were all afraid of some predatory monster that was apparently tracking us, but that none of us had seen. And in the end...”

He thinks back to the scene, the glaring light, the ice melting under their feet, floating in broken pieces along the nearby river, and all of them arranged as in a grotesque tableau, some of them high on drugs and the others on daylight and exhaustion, Collins wandering their camp like a child, bright-eyed and maddeningly cheerful, while Le Vesconte screamed at him to get in the car - the car that Hartnell had spent the past hour trying to fix - and Morfin sat in the snow mumbling, and Des Voeux, who was the only one with the requisite licence, pulled out his rifle and declared he’d go shoot the bear.

Edward had stumbled between Des Voeux and Collins before the gun went off and for an extremely long twenty seconds, he stared death in the face, and grappled with the part of him that would not move out of the way.

“Hartnell told him to put the gun down, but he wouldn’t do it. I don’t have… clear memories of the way things went down, but I heard about it often enough afterwards, when we all stood before all those boards and committees after we got back. The gun went off. Collins got shot in the leg and fell into the river.”

The deafening splash, the abruptness of Collins’ disappearance underwater had done far more to spur them to action than the gunshot itself. Edward remembers the naked shock on Des Voeux’s face, how they’d all rushed to the bank and halted as they saw the blood, a moment before Collins’ head broke through the surface and they could reach down, all of them gathered at the edge and organising the rescue more efficiently than they had this entire trip, pulling out a drenched Collins and fetching dry clothes and blankets and medical supplies.

“We were miles away from the nearest settlement, let alone from the nearest hospital, and the car had broken down. Fixing it took hours and in the meantime Collins was weeping as the drugs wore out and we only had the barest of first-aid kits. Once Hartnell had managed to start the car we decided we’d take Collins to the nearest settlement, try and get him rescued from there. Just me and Hartnell and Collins, leaving the others behind. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so free as when we drove away from that river. After two, three hours, I took over the driving so Hartnell could rest - I got us to the settlement, but I couldn’t say how. We didn’t go back for the others - we made sure they’d get help, but that’s about it. I don’t think anything could have made us turn around. Collins was evacuated to a hospital in the south and we joined him there after a couple of days. Hartnell got in touch with Goodsir and a week later he was drilling ice three hundred miles away. Before he left, we talked about it. All of it, sitting in the waiting room at that hospital. He said that they’d publish their findings anyways, regardless of what had happened. And most of us did. Des Voeux put out a piece about plankton that’s still regarded as a turning point in his admittedly narrow field. But that’s Cambridge for you. I know many people who screwed around for years and still got out with a first.”

He puts out the cigarette and tentatively places his hand above Thomas’ on his leg.

“Hickey was discreetly asked to finish his PhD elsewhere after Vancouver, but nothing happened to any of us. We were open about most of it with the faculty, but the only casualty that couldn’t be glossed over was Collins’ injury, and Collins was never going to go after Des Voeux or anyone else. He was so high at the time, he could barely remember what had happened. During Le Vesconte’s disciplinary hearing, one of the faculty members actually came out with ‘boys will be boys’ as a conclusion.”

Finally he turns around to look at Thomas, finding him very much awake, his expression thoughtful but neither shocked nor accusatory.

“I couldn’t reach out to you after that,” Edward murmurs. “I would have avoided Francis if I could. The only thing I knew to do was work.” He hesitates. “Then I went to Russia. But that’s another story, really.”

“For some other time, then.”

Thomas leans over him to put the ashtray back on the bedside table. Edward recognises the gesture from their time together in Cambridge, right before he left, when he’d start falling asleep on a book and Thomas would catch the ashtray before it fell.

Edward has a brief, strangled laugh. He couldn’t say if it’s the fact that Thomas’ behaviour towards him hasn’t changed - if it’s the dawning suspicion that he could have reached out to him back then and found him ready to listen, even after the expedition committee had sidelined him as if he was utterly disposable - if it’s the rush of air this unburdening of past wrongs has let in inside his lungs, or the realisation that he hadn’t shared the full story with anyone in ten years, not since James’ therapist friend had pulled it out of him, scrap by scrap, over the course of several excruciating sessions.

“I worry,” he says, determined that this should be voiced at least once, “that I’m not the kind of person that will make you happy.”

“Based on what?” Thomas asks. “The fact that you got run over by Le Vesconte ten years ago when you tried to argue for my place on that expedition? The fact that you felt too guilty to face me after that? Or the fact that, thanks to you, I’m in the Arctic right now, and on the eve of another expedition? You idiot,” he adds, with infinite fondness. “Did I look unhappy to you when I saw you at the airport, or during the three hours we spent in bed today? Happiness is relative of course, but as far as I can tell, being here, with you - this is just about the happiest I’ve ever been.”

Edward swallows. Suddenly it seems safer to stir the conversation back to less emotional grounds.

“Do you have a better story to share?” he asks. “A livelier one. The kind where the party survives insurmountable odds.”

Thomas thinks about it.

“How about… A story of the Terra Nova expedition? Campbell’s party, and the horrible winter they spent at Evans Cove.”

“I’m dubious about the ‘horrible’ there,” Edward notes, with raised eyebrows. “But by all means, go ahead.”


	15. diving in, 2019 and 2009

Edward was waiting for Tom Hartnell in the hallway of the Scott Polar Research Institute when the front door opened and Thomas Jopson walked in, ten years older than when Edward had seen him last. And yet it was unmistakably Jopson, with that tranquil gait like he had somewhere to be and nothing would keep him from getting there in time - with that misleading, unassuming air and, when he turned, the blue-green eyes drawing you in, until they were the only thing you could see.

Even after all this time, the idea of having lost Jopson’s good opinion remained shameful and hurtful enough that Edward shied away from it whenever he thought back to his college days. And yet, that day at the Institute, he found himself calling out - found himself smiling, not about the way they’d fallen out, but about all that had come before that.

Three years of working for Francis Crozier, of sharing the monstrous mustard couch and the patchy carpet - of Jopson looking over the essays Edward had graded and of Edward proofreading the occasional history paper that Jopson had left lying around - of Edward trying to pry a glass out of Crozier’s shaking hand, late already for a formal, his gown stained with expensive whiskey, and of Jopson’s fingers touching his wrist, raising goosebumps along his forearm - _Just go, I’ll take care of this._

Edward picking up his coat and announcing that he was heading out for a smoke and Jopson jumping up, _I’ll come along_, despite the fact that he didn’t smoke.

The sight of Jopson smoking - only ever on those breaks from their work in Crozier’s office - as Edward watched him suck in a mouthful of smoke with ravenous eyes and thought, _If I had the guts, I’d shove him against the wall and drop to my knees._

“Hadn’t seen these in a while,” he’d said in the hall of the Institute, looking up at the painting of the Antarctic above his head, in its clean, cold whites and blues, with the gold star at the center like a guiding light.

Inwardly, he decided that if Jopson didn’t answer him, he wouldn’t insist. Jopson had more than enough reasons to never want to speak to him again.

But if Jopson did, Edward would try - finally try - to forgive himself.

“Me neither,” Jopson said.

And when Edward stepped forward on a whim, walking through the door to the museum, Jopson followed - he followed Edward through the museum and then accompanied him outside, and then to a narrow porch on a rainy sidestreet where he kissed Edward as if that had also been on the back of his mind for years, like a regrettable omission, a life-altering mistake, of the sort you can only unmake by taking the plunge and letting yourself sink - lower and lower hoping your feet will eventually touch ground - and this time Edward jumped in alongside him and let himself be blissfully borne down.

When people ask him why he chose to study the Arctic, Edward answers that it was a matter of circumstances. He needed to pick a third language at school and his friends at the time had picked Russian, in no small part because the young female lecturer was pretty. Then like many a student at his college he’d heard about Crozier and came to be tutored by him, and eventually Crozier had slapped a paper that Edward had written about human settlements on St Lawrence Island on the table in front of him, which some geography lecturer had read over, graded with a rare 75, and passed on to Crozier with a note simply stating “Inuits”.

“I could use an assistant,” Crozier had said. “Part-time and decently paid, considering. Would you be interested in the position?”

The whiskey runs had been carefully edited out of that description, and Edward has always wondered if Crozier picked him because like so many young men who’d spent their formative years at an elite private school, Edward was taught to ignore chaos in the name of a faint appearance of order.

When he first saw Crozier after his return from Murmansk, Crozier sat him down on the mustard couch and handed him a cup of tea. They had both aged ten years over the summer. For the first ten minutes, neither of them said anything, until Edward’s hands began to shake so badly that the teacup rattled on its saucer. Crozier pried it from his hands and set is aside, and he put a hand on Edward’s shoulder.

“Let us learn from our mistakes,” he said.

Edward nodded.

“I’m dreadfully sorry, sir.”

“Onwards, Edward,” Francis said. “Forever onwards.”

That same week, Edward had cycled to a rowing outing and found Des Voeux waiting outside the boathouse. Edward stoked his anger as they brought out the boat and set it in the water, as they knocked the blades in place and took their seats and pushed away from the bank, and then he turned around and wrestled Des Voeux into the river. The episode led to the both of them being banned from ever rowing for the college again.

The official reason as inscribed in Edward’s academic profile was “a lack of sportsmanship”.

When people ask him why he chose to study the Arctic, Edward answers that it was a matter of circumstances.

“Bullshit,” Sol says. “You picked Russian because you’re an existential crisis in motion and you dress like a beggar prince that’s fled the Revolution. You study the Arctic because it feels more real to you than your own country, and you study Arctic cities because a part of you is still trying to get back at your education by doing something useful. You went back to Russia because you like a problem and you work with Crozier because he’s the best teacher and scholar you’ve ever met. You didn’t end up in the middle of fucking nowhere by accident.”

“Do you know who you remind me of, with that kind of brutal character assessment?”

“Fuck you,” Sol says, and hangs up.

And for good measure, Edward receives a picture a few seconds later, of Sol giving him the finger against a background of red, broken mountains.

_Fuck you too_, he answers, and sends back a picture that George took earlier in the evening at Natalia’s, where Edward, Thomas and Sophia are sitting side by side on Natalia’s sunken couch, trying to arrange their elbows without spilling their tea.


	16. here, now, tomorrow, 2019

Edward sends in both his articles to be reviewed. In the mornings he walks over to his station in his socks and sits there sipping his coffee as he puts in a few hours of work. There are enough empty workstations in the room that Thomas was able to appropriate one - in one of the desk drawers, they’d found an emergency evacuation procedure dating from the 1970s, and a can of unopened soup that must have been roughly the same age.

On mornings when Edward knows the others won’t come in, he allows himself to go back to sleep, or lies awake in a half-sleep, imagining that he can see the ice creep up the walls. The room itself is rarely ever cold. Edward holds on to Thomas’ warmth as if he might be able to store it for later use - he relishes those early hours when the whole station is empty but for the two of them and the first sound that he hears upon waking up is the creak of the bed and the rustle of the bedsheets as Thomas turns over, awake enough to reach for Edward and fit himself against his back. The morning then burns itself away in lazy lovemaking, until they either fall asleep again or find the motivation to work, and on days when neither option seems suitable, Edward pulls up his laptop from the floor and introduces Thomas to some obscure Russian film or documentary.

Late in the afternoon they set out on long walks through the town, with Sophia or Natalia joining them sometimes, Thomas practicing his Russian and showing more ability for it than George which, admittedly, is a low bar to clear.

Edward’s happiness is a quiet ache, like handfuls of new snow, vivid and fresh and eventually bound to melt through his fingers as he desperately tries to cling to it. It stems from the wonder in Thomas’ eyes as he takes in the ice and the long rectangular blocks of the buildings lining the wide avenues, with the green and pink and yellow paint of their facades peeling off and revealing the skeleton beneath, concrete and rusting metal. It stems from the atmosphere of tranquil competence in the common room at the research station when everyone has turned in for the day and from the taste of Natalia’s tea, with the spoonfuls of honey that she’ll put in whether they wanted some or not, and from the cold radiating from Thomas’ skin when Edward kisses him after they’ve come in from a late night wander around the artificial lake. All of it is memorable and fleeting and Edward watches the month run away from him, ice turned to water and trickling down, the permafrost melting, one of the bears turning up dead one night close to the main prospekt, and when the numbers finally add up it turns out that unless someone starts drilling the ice for fossil fuels in defiance of international laws, this city, like so many others, will gradually decline and die.

It might not happen in Edward’s lifetime, and he decided long ago that he would not be a harbinger of doom; what he records is the endurance of human life in the north, the persistence of cultural practices, the people leaving and the people coming back and the people leaving and the people moving in, every thread that everyone holds onto, the city’s two schools and the swimming club, the memories of gulag prisoners, of the city being built.

“If everyone leaves this place, I’ll just follow to wherever they go next,” he tells George one morning over breakfast, sitting at the kitchen table in an old t-shirt and shorts, the warm mug with its cloud formations pressed between his hands.

“Don’t you want to go home, sometimes?” George asks, holding on to his own mug with its floating tea bag of PG Tips. “Stay longer than a few months somewhere, I mean.”

“Where would that be, though?” Edward shrugs. “Cambridge, really? I can’t see myself spending my life there. Buying a house. That's not who I am.”

The question lingers in his mind, however.

_Don’t you want to go home?_

And the answer comes too late, when George is nowhere near to hear it - at the airport, waiting for the plane that will take Thomas back to Moscow and then onwards to Cambridge via London.

_I am home._

Neither in Cambridge or in the Arctic, really, but here, in between, everywhere and nowhere at once - sitting on a blue plastic chair as Thomas drifts off on his shoulder; scrolling down his phone as he reads over the proof of a chapter for Hartnell. Edward only knows what Hartnell told him about Alpine glaciers, but Hartnell structures his sentences like he’s translated them from Russian to Inuktitut to English, with a scientist’s disdain for spelling, and Thomas has extended his long legs and put his feet up on his backpack and he’s listening to something, probably a podcast. The plane won’t be announced for another hour.

_I am home,_ Edward thinks again, feeling more awake than he has in months, more present, without the fogginess induced by a lack of sleep. He adds a full stop in the middle of one of Hartnell’s overlong sentences, and hits the return key.


End file.
